The moral rot of race-based government policies is putting lives at risk as some states and cities refuse to give coronavirus treatments to white people.
Enough is enough. Once and for all, no government anywhere should condition its benefits or its judgments on the perceived race of a person. Moreover, even in the realm of private affairs, we all should stop obsessing about race and skin color. Making judgments on the basis of race is the very definition of racism, pure and simple — and taking actions based on racial judgments is racial discrimination. Racial discrimination, always and everywhere, is invidious.
In various jurisdictions across the country, including the states of New York and Utah, authorities consider race a “risk factor” in determining eligibility for antiviral pills and monoclonal antibody treatments used to counter COVID-19. In other words, a black or Hispanic patient may be provided an antiviral pill that is denied to a white person with an entirely similar medical profile.
These sorts of potentially life-or-death decisions based solely on race are stunningly immoral. They’re also not based on any science. The higher incidence of COVID-19 mortality among some races occurs not because of some inherent biological susceptibility but on other, nonracial factors such as diet, education levels, refusal to receive vaccines, poverty (and its effects), and the like. As is often the case, correlation is not causation.
Writing in the Jan. 7 Wall Street Journal, longtime Democratic analysts Ruy Teixeira and John B. Judis present the hypothetical, but entirely realistic, example of a wealthy banker of Colombian descent (and thus “Hispanic”) being given a treatment that is denied to “a laid-off middle-aged worker of Italian ancestry” (and thus “white”).
Teixeira and Judis state the obvious conclusion quite clearly: “This is unfair and possibly illegal.” Their further recommendations are also of obvious wisdom: “[Decisions as to] who should receive scarce Covid treatments should be based on genuine medical risk factors such as age and comorbidity.” Period, end of question.
It is stunning that anybody, much less any public officials, should think otherwise. And, as a matter of civil rights laws and the U.S. Constitution, these policies almost certainly would lose, overwhelmingly, if challenged in court in a timely fashion. As well they should.
Still, it’s not hard to see such invidious discrimination as a moral monstrosity when health and even life may hang in the balance. Of course the poor white laborer should not be denied treatment because his skin isn’t dark enough. Yet somehow, some people won’t draw the same lines when something other than health is at issue. Much of the Left, especially, seems fixated on identity politics and insistent on race-based policy edicts. In more private realms, meanwhile, white racists continue to do grave damage to the social fabric as well.
Enough should be enough should be enough. The cure for racial discrimination cannot be racial discrimination. And in public policy backed by the force of the state, the state’s apparatus should operate equally upon every human individual, regardless of race or ethnicity. The state should vigorously punish racial discrimination that touches on any public good. It should not practice any such discrimination of its own, not even in the name of “equity.”
We are individuals in the eyes of God. Our only race is the human race. Every time we act otherwise, we commit an absolute evil.
