Judging people by the color of their skin, not the content of their character, has long been unpopular in the United States, which is why an overwhelming majority of people, 68%, agreed with the recent Supreme Court decision to ban affirmative action in college admissions.
For many Democrats, however, living without a racial spoils system would lead to the demographics of some professions not reflecting the demographics of the overall population. If a person’s race truly did not affect their performance, this shouldn’t be a problem. White patients should feel comfortable seeing black doctors and black patients should feel comfortable seeing white doctors.
But for Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, that colorblind outcome is unacceptable. Judging from her dissent in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, she believes black patients should only trust black doctors and white patients should only trust white doctors. It is a horribly racist and segregationist argument, but it is one she apparently believes based on a study of high-risk black newborns.
In her dissent, Jackson wrote, “Beyond campus, the diversity that UNC pursues for the betterment of its students and society is not a trendy slogan. It saves lives. … For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die.”
The study Jackson cites examined data on Florida births between 1992 and 2015. The study did find that the survival rate for all black newborns was 99.1% with white doctors and 99.6% with black doctors. Already, we have two problems with Jackson’s claim. First, the data was on all black newborns, and second, the survival rate for both white and black doctors was over 99%, so her claim that “having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die,” is just false. She could have said, “having a black doctor halves the odds a black newborn will die,” but that is not what she said.
Jackson either can’t do basic math or she’s a liar.
Even worse for Jackson, researchers have now come back to the same data the original study used and found a huge problem with their methodology. Now, as anyone familiar with infant mortality rates knows, the less a baby weighs, the less likely that baby is to survive.
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This means that if a researcher wanted an honest analysis of infant mortality rates by a doctor’s race, they should control for the weight of the babies treated. The study Jackson cited did not do that. And it turns out that white doctors treated a higher percentage of underweight black babies than black doctors did. Once the weight of the babies treated was corrected for, the racial disparity in survival outcomes disappeared.
We should all be pleased by the outcome of a study showing that white doctors and black doctors are equally good at their jobs regardless of the race of their patients. But for Democrats such as Jackson whose careers are dependent on creating racial division, this new study is a huge problem.