[gozur88]

>When US sociologists and political scientists talk about “systemic and structural racism” this is one of the manifestations.

Which has always bothered me, since there are other explanations (lifestyle habits, genetics, poverty) that would explain the difference, in whole or in part. It's a politically convenient assumption that goes contrary to Occam's Razor.

[blaurenceclark]

I'm going to quote what someone said below because this is blatantly false

"This is not only false, but dangerously false. We are in the process of discovering that certain classes of popularly-prescribed drugs (eg ACE inhibitors for blacks, certain chemotherapy drugs for Asians) are ineffective or even toxic for populations not represented in the relevant drug development research cohorts. It's not identity politics to note that pharmacokinetics can differ between individuals and populations. These differences do not explain all of the population-level morbidity and mortality differences between ethnicities, but they are significant when investigating differences between groups on the same course of treatment."

[gozur88]

... which is why I listed genetics under "other explanations". Did you read the whole comment?

[malyk]

I just finished reading "Color of Law", which, while not the best formatted book, gives a really really good overview of the systematic, government led, programs designed and enforced explicitly against african americans from the late 1870s until the 1980s. It's a pretty quick read and well worth it for anyone who thinks that "systematic racism" isn't real.

https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segreg...

[cadlin]

Black people have worse health outcomes controlling for obesity and poverty.

Blaming genetics for such a wide range of negative outcomes is silly if you're looking for a simple explanation. Consider this[1] paper on cervical cancer. There are nine different genes linked to it. Now do that for every relatively worse health outcome. That's the opposite of simple.

Lifestyle is even more nebulous. It encompasses so much that suggesting it's a kind of verbal jujitsu to suggest it's an adequate use of Occam's Razor. There are hundreds of lifestyle factors and you can weight them however you want to get the result you want.

All of those are about as broad and as simple as racism, which you appear to categorically disregard as a plausible explanation.

[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19347305

[infosample]

Occam's Razor: among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.

You dismissed one assumption and named three more. Please explain which applies to Occam's razor.

If you can then explain how your selection isn't related to structural racism and isn't politically convenient for you, I'd appreciate it.

[gozur88]

>You dismissed one assumption and named three more. Please explain which applies to Occam's razor.

Because there is a direct correlation between observable characteristics like obesity and poverty to health outcomes for people of all races. If a fat, poor white woman in Appalachia has heart problems in her 40s and receives low quality care, is that a result of systemic racism?

And as others have pointed out, we don't know the entire scope of genetic effects, but we know they exist to some degree (which was the whole point of the article).

[forapurpose]

> a politically convenient assumption

The centuries-long existence of slavery, segregation (which was brutal oppression, including lynching), and racism isn't an "assumption", but indisputable fact. Occam's Razor is not a real arbiter of truth, but in this case it cuts the other way: Racism is the simpler and blazingly obvious explanation, backed by endless reearch and even the most casual observation. You really have to work to contrive explanations that don't include systemic and structural racism.

> poverty

Another outcome of those centuries.

[gozur88]

>Racism is the simpler and blazingly obvious explanation, backed by endless reearch and even the most casual observation.

Things that are wrong can be obvious to individuals and groups of people. It's certainly not obvious to half the country, and that "endless research" is tainted. How long do you get to keep your job in academia if you point out the primary drivers of black misery in the US (out of wedlock births, drugs, and violence) are self inflicted?

[matthew3]

Something like the negative effects of concentrated poverty seems to fit Occam's Razor well enough. "The most obviously-shared attribute amongst clusters of extremely poor minorities across the country is the clustering of poverty, and here are some potential causal ways this can lead to different lifestyle habits, different levels of education, different access to health care, etc."

That seems way more likely to me than oft-hinted-at-by-the-"politically-incorrect" "here's a cluster of people who all made the same bad decisions or were victims of the same bad luck in the same way, for no underlying reason other than genetic factors also associated with the color of their skin." That's pretty damn "politically convenient" if you're not in the minority population, too - "hey guys, it's not our fault! They just suck!" Hard to imagine something more politically convenient to the lucky than that.