Conjectures and myths

An unpopular truth

[Reprinted from Issues & Views February 25, 2002]

It is indeed astounding to see how far some can stretch their imaginations to find "evidence" of white racism. Consider the example of Dr. Ernest Johnson, a psychologist who concludes, from his study of 1,000 Florida tenth-graders, that black teens tend to be angrier than their white peers. Theorizing that this black anger is bred by white America's many racists, Dr. Johnson does not even speculate as to whether it may result, at least in part, from the constant threat of black predators terrorizing their own neighborhoods. Nor does he trace it, even in part, to the fact that scarcely 35 percent of black youngsters currently live in two-parent homes.

Concurring with Johnson is Dr. Elijah Saunders, a black cardiologist at the University of Maryland Medical School, who asserts that "if there were no racism in America, hypertension would be less of a problem for blacks." Hypertension is at near-epidemic proportions among blacks and is chiefly responsible for their high mortality rates from heart and kidney disease and stroke. It makes sense to me that racism and black rage are emotional stressors that could worsen any physiological tendency toward hypertension. Remarkably, Saunders does not even theorize that black-on-black violence--rampant as it is--might account for even a fraction of black Americans' stress-induced cardiovascular disease. Rather, we are presumably to believe that white racists lurking around every corner, practicing their craft, are our country's principal agents of black malaise and hypertension. Incidentally, it should be noted that in 1994 medical researchers discovered that blood-vessel elasticity--essential for cardiovascular health--tends to be greater in whites than in blacks. Thus it may be that racial differences in the incidence of high blood pressure are caused by nothing more sinister than physiology.

But if, as Dr. Saunders claims, black hypertension rates implicate white racism, how then are we to interpret suicide rates? By Saunders' logic, the comparative suicide rates of blacks and whites should reveal important information about the relative degrees of stress afflicting members of each race. A disproportionately high incidence of suicide among blacks, for example, would surely be hailed by "civil rights" messiahs as evidence that racism was casting its deadly shadow over the souls of black Americans.

Yet, in fact, white men have a substantially higher suicide rate than black men (19.9 per 100,000 population versus 12.5 per 100,000), while the rate for white women is about two and a half times greater than for black women (4.8 versus 1.9 per 100,000). Could it be that whites, feeling overwhelmed by the many black-on-white attacks that occur annually in this country, sometimes react by taking their own lives in despair? No one ever asks this question; indeed the very notion is dismissed as preposterous. The intent here, of course, is not to advance the theory that black racism leads to white suicides, but merely to suggest that such a conjecture is no more absurd than one attributing black hypertension to white racism.

-- John Perazzo, from his book, The Myths That Divide Us: How lies have poisoned American race relations (World Studies Books).

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