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Posted on 09/01/2003 10:54:29 PM PDT by Diddle E. Squat
Have you heard about the latest California crusade?
It's called Proposition 54, and it's based on the utopian ideal that race doesn't matter. The proposition stipulates that state and local officials can't collect or use information regarding someone's race, ethnicity, color or national origin for the purpose of public education, public contracting, public employment or other government operations.
The mastermind behind Prop. 54 is a mild-mannered man by the name of Ward Connerly. He also happens to be African-American. But people are warned not to use that term in his presence. As Connerly sees it, race isn't real.
Well, in a society where skin color still segregates, and languages other than English intimidate, race is very real and cannot yet be ignored.
If we did ignore race, then it would never have been known that a disproportionate number of people of color were being singled out for police stops and searches, or that children of color constituted the majority of school dropouts and teenage pregnancies.
We'd never know just how much more difficult it was for African-Americans and Hispanics to get bank loans or home mortgages, or that a visit to the doctor by people of color didn't automatically result in the same quality of care.
And we wouldn't have known that in some cities where "minorities" constitute a substantial portion of the population, candidates of color never seem to get enough votes to win an election.
Yet in spite of these examples as to why we need to pay attention to race, there exists an even more compelling reason: medical genetics.
Neil Risch, a Stanford University population geneticist, argues that the medical community should not be in such a hurry to whitewash folks. For too long, clinical drug trials were performed with few people of color as test subjects. The consequence has been a surprise to researchers when certain racial and ethnic groups have had unforeseen reactions to FDA-approved drugs.
By not taking our differences into account, important medical discoveries are missed, helping to explain why certain diseases or drug reactions are more prevalent among one ethnic group than another.
Already it's been discovered that certain groups within our population metabolize drugs differently, experience distinct side effects, develop disease for different reasons and have adverse reactions to medical procedures.
For example, it's been found that pain medications, such as codeine, metabolize differently in East Asians than in Anglos. Whereas two tablets of codeine may do the trick to help Anglo patients rest comfortably, the same dosage wouldn't bring any relief to East Asian pain sufferers.
Even simple procedures such as placing a breathing tube down a patient's windpipe call to keep in mind the ethnicity of the patient. Anesthesiologists realize that black patients salivate more heavily than other patients, causing complications in the airway.
Overmedication can be a problem, too. Doctors now know that Latinos with schizophrenia don't need as much antipsychotic medication as Anglos to achieve the same drug levels in the bloodstream. And the latest research published in the August issue of the Archives of Ophthalmology reveals that a child's ethnicity determines the chances of developing common eye disorders.
In other circles, targeting these racial differences would be considered politically incorrect and probably referred to as
racial profiling. There is even an ongoing debate in the medical community on whether to use race as a variable in medical research.
However, unlike other situations where people of color are targeted unfairly because of their skin color or accent, racial profiling in medical matters must not be seen through colorblind eyes.
Especially, when it boils down to a race between life and death.
----------------------------------------------------- Treviño, of Rowlett, Texas, is a contributing columnist with Hispanic Link News Service. She may be reached by e-mail at mtrevino@airmail.net.
"...And finally, in the interest of public health, we have exempted ALL racial categorizations made by health care and medical professionals. Clause (f) of the initiative reads, “Otherwise lawful classification of medical research subjects and patients shall be exempt from this section.” No person’s health care, or any epidemiological studies that reveal disease patterns, will be affected by RPI."
So either the writer and the Chronicle news editors never read the prop, or they are purposefully lying by ommission and misrepresentation(I know, par for the course for the Chronicle).
Maybe we can have a contest to see who, if any, can write a pithy correction slapping them down for such a ridiculous journalistic error. Such false reporting is totally unacceptable. Here is their contact info:
To contact us: E-mail: online@chron.com Office phone: 713-220-2700 Main Switchboard: 713-220-7171 Address: Houston Chronicle 801 Texas Ave. Houston, Texas 77002 Reader Representative: James T. Campbell E-mail: readerrep@chron.com Phone: 713-220-6303
True, true. It's been known to lead to demonstrably idiotic newspaper columns, in the past. :)
I guess that means, extending the twisted (as usual) logic of the loony left, that we should be encouraging DNA cataloging of all humans so that "Medical Science" can deicide exactly what to do when one of us specimens walks into a doctor's office, based on our DNA profile and the exhaustive database that "Medical Science" has accumulated... and they're afraid that Prop 54 will...
(oops... sorry, forgot to turn my crystal ball off, dammit.)
Everyone of the examples which the author quoted as reasons for continuing the collection of this information can be easily explained as a result of something other than racism and discrimination if a little bit of intellectual rigor was used. Of course, if this were the case, we might actual be able to solve these problems if they have solutions at all ( i.e. I don't know what I can do to remedy the poor credit histories of blacks and Hispanics).
The argument that we need to collect these statistics, because they will point out the existence racism and discrimination, kind of commits the classic mistake of "begging the question."
So, no amount of progress is good enough for these people. They see racism somewhere and assume that it exists everywhere. I don't know how many times I've gotten liberal friends of mine to admit (after trying to persuade them through reason or moral arguments) that they think most people are racist and so government must do this or that. I don't know whether they actually believe this, but they have surely convinced themselves that it is an a priori position required by their politics.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
No, but I am wearing my goverment issued rose colored glasses today.
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A couple of observations:
1) This statement loses some of it's impact when translated from the original German...
2) Klan members, such as David Duke or Robert Byrd, couldn't have said it better.
What about people with big noses? What about people with blonde hair vs. red hair, what about bowlegged people vs. flat-footed people? How do we know how much more difficult life is for THEM? I think we need some really long checklists if we are going to really effectively divide our society into envious squabbling factions.
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