“‘Capitalism,’ ‘white supremacy,’ and ‘structural racism’ are to blame for the high rate of black maternal health problems in the U.S., according to a new study out of Harvard University,” reports Campus Reform:
The study, “A conceptual understanding of the impact of interconnected forms of racism on maternal hypertension through Black Women’s lived experiences,” asserts that black women have disproportionately high maternal mortality and hypertension rates because of systemic racism.
To solve the problem and “truly dismantle structural racism … it is absolutely necessary to attend to the underlying ideologies that allow these inequities in resources and opportunities to continue, especially capitalism and white supremacy,” Harvard fellow and lead researcher Brittney Francis wrote in the study, published in August in SSM – Qualitative Research in Health.
Black communities are “plagued by policies and practices, steeped in white supremacist and racial capitalistic ideologies, that directly shape their access to resources and opportunities,” states the study, which primarily came from the FXB Center for Health & Human Rights at Harvard University.
As a result, black women have higher maternal mortality and hypertension rates, the researchers wrote.
Asked to explain “racial capitalism,” Francis told The College Fix via email it “refers to a capitalistic system” where people are “intentionally exploited and commodified” by the “dominant” racial group to get rich. She gave the example of individuals being asked about prior incarceration status in housing and job assistance programs.
While the Civil Rights Act prohibits explicit racial discrimination, she told The Fix that many practices still discriminate by focusing on areas that “disproportionately impact one racial group over the others.”
“Because mass incarceration unjustly impacts Black and Hispanic families in the U.S., these families are also really impacted by this policy/practice more,” Francis said via email to The Fix this month. Therefore, asking about prior incarceration “excludes many families that need immediate assistance with resources during critical times, including pregnancy,” she said.
Asked to weigh in, one healthcare watchdog organization argued there appears to be flaws with the research methods and conclusion.
“This ‘study’ presupposes racism and then seeks evidence in favor of their conclusion. Their approach is a flagrant violation of sound research practice,” Ian Kingsbury, director of research at Do No Harm, told The College Fix.
For the study, researchers asked 20 black women in Connecticut who had a hypertensive disorder during their last pregnancy about their neighborhoods, interactions with healthcare providers, and other “experiences with structural racism in their daily lives.”
Prior to asking the women for input, the research team “shared the importance of the study, how it aligned with their personal and professional goals,” and “the intended purposes of the data after collection.”
Kingsbury told The College Fix these statements likely slanted the participants’ responses.
“The researchers tipped off or even explicitly told the participants what they were hoping to observe,” raising questions of quality assurance and input bias, he said….Kingsbury told The College Fix that some of the study’s assertions about racial inequalities are outright false, including “inequitable education funding.”
Contrary to the study’s claim of “inequitable education funding,” black students tend to have slightly higher per-capita education spending on them than white students do, as the Heritage Foundation explains in this study.
Harvard University, which was once an excellent school, has deteriorated a lot in recent years. It was recently rated the university most hostile to free speech, by a non-partisan civil-liberties group, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. So it is not surprising that a Harvard researcher would publish this mindless tripe.
It is true that blacks have shorter life spans on average than whites (partly reflecting black-on-black crime — a majority of homicide victims are black, mostly killed by other blacks. According to FBI data, 89 percent of blacks who were murdered in 2018 were killed by black offenders.).
But Hispanics live longer than whites on average, and Asians live significantly longer than whites, calling into question the study’s assumption that racial gaps in health and well-being show white supremacy.
The study cites “mass incarceration” as a manifestation of racism. But incarceration occurs because someone committed a crime, not because of their race. The fact that blacks are arrested and incarcerated at a higher rate than whites is not a reason for reparations, either. In United States v. Armstrong (1996), the Supreme Court ruled that a higher black arrest rate didn’t show racism, since it might just reflect a higher black crime rate, and statistics show different groups have different crime rates. The black crime rate is much higher, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. It found that for homicides, “the offending rates for blacks were more than 7 times higher the rates for whites” between 1976 and 2005. (See BJS, Homicide Trends in the United States).
The higher black arrest rate is not due to racism. A 2021 study by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics found that although blacks are arrested for serious nonfatal violent crimes at more than twice the rate of people in general, this is not due to racism. Instead, arrests are correctly “proportional” to the actual crime rate, and to the crimes actually reported to the police, which often are committed by black offenders. As it noted, in 2018, “white and black people were arrested proportionate to their involvement in serious nonfatal violent crime overall and proportionate to their involvement in serious nonfatal violent crime reported to police.” (See Allen J. Beck, Race and Ethnicity of Violent Crime Offenders and Arrestees, 2018).
Many studies that claim to find racism are based on junk science or outright falsification of data. A professor at Florida State University was recently fired for fraudulent research finding widespread racism.
Many studies that claim to find racism based on statistical disparities omit major variables needed to test whether racial disparities are due to racism, or are instead the result of non-discriminatory causes. (The Supreme Court’s Croson decision warns that it is “completely unrealistic” to expect that minorities will be found in every field in “lockstep proportion to their representation in the local population” in the absence of racism. Yet academics commonly make just that unrealistic assumption).
If a researcher studies a field and claims to find widespread discrimination in it (such as in an industry, or in the criminal justice system), it is easy to get that finding of discrimination published in an academic journal, even if the researcher has omitted major variables needed to actually prove discrimination, or even if the researcher is unwilling to make his data available (many studies contain the claim that the authors’ data will be made available upon request, but this is often a lie — the authors usually decline to turn over the data when it is later requested. 93% of authors who indicated that data was available on request either did not respond or declined to share their data, according to a recent study in an academic journal).
By contrast, if a researcher finds that systemic discrimination is absent in a field or the criminal justice system, the researcher may be unable to get his research published. And if it is published, a finding of non-discrimination may trigger reprisals by left-wing academics, against the study’s author and those who publish or disseminate it (as The College Fix noted in the article “Scholar forced to resign over study that found police shootings not biased against blacks.”).
A truthful academic can lose his job over a single accurate study that angers progressives by finding that racism is not widespread. And such a study may well be retracted even if its methodology was reliable and the underlying data was accurate. For example, a study finding that police shootings were generally not racist was retracted because it was cited by a conservative in the Wall Street Journal. Heather Mac Donald, a conservative legal scholar, had discussed the study in a widely-read Wall Street Journal column, “The Myth of Systemic Police Racism.”
That publicity resulted in an enormous backlash against the academics who conducted and discussed the study, by progressive academics angry about its conclusions.
The first casualty of the backlash was Stephen Hsu, the Vice President for Research at Michigan State University. He was forced to resign because he publicly discussed the study, as The College Fix notes in the article “Scholar forced to resign over study that found police shootings not biased against blacks.”
As the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation notes, “Hsu’s crime was publicizing research done at his university, which is exactly what you would expect a VP of research to do. But the particular piece of research reached [an ideologically] Forbidden Conclusion.” The research was valid, but in today’s academia, “the truth shall get you fired.”
After witnessing what happened to Hsu, the researchers who conducted the study, such as Michigan State’s Joseph Cesario, sought their own article’s retraction, citing its “misuse by the media” — that is, the Wall Street Journal, which accurately described the study.
But as a law professor notes, there was no reason to retract this study other than politics. David Bernstein is a law professor at George Mason University, and a legal expert on junk science and the admissibility of scientific evidence. He also is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, which highlights police abuse and wrongful killings by the police.
Professor Bernstein observes that “It’s absurd to ask that a valid study be retracted b/c you think others are ‘misusing’ it. A study says what it says, and so long as it wasn’t actually flawed it shouldn’t be retracted for political reasons except perhaps under truly extreme circumstances, which this isn’t.” In discussing an alleged defect in the study, he noted that “the extrapolation” the studies’ critics “are objecting to seems to me a perfectly reasonable one.” Given the weaknesses of the objections to the study, he agreed with a commenter who concluded that the “request for retraction resulted from a sustained attempt to discredit politically unpopular research,” rather than anything being wrong with the research.
