Is there no end to Whitey’s atrocities? Never satisfied with the evil he has already committed, now he is giving poor People of Color arthritis. As investigative journalist Daniel Greenfield observed, “400 years ago it might have been witches. Today it’s systemic racism.” Indeed. If I tried to parody woke race-hustling by writing about someone claiming that the cause of arthritis is racism, even the Babylon Bee would reject it as too outlandish. But in its race-obsessed hysteria, the Left is nothing today if not outlandish.
Creaky Joints, “a digital community for millions of arthritis patients and caregivers worldwide who seek education, support, advocacy, and patient-centered research,” published an article Thursday entitled: “Study Suggests Systemic Racism Might Contribute to Inflammation.” Of course! There’s always a “study” ready to justify the latest fool idea that has become fashionable among Leftists.
This is the Left’s cult of intellectualism, giving the form of rational thought without the substance, so as to make Leftists more comfortable with their superstititions, hatreds, and hysteria by cloaking it all with an aura of intellectual respectability. In this case, the systemic-racism-causes-arthritis study is an elaborate house of cards built on numerous false assumptions and fallacies, most notably post hoc ergo propter hoc, that is, B followed A, therefore A caused B. As Sportin’ Life reminded us long ago, it ain’t necessarily so.
The Creaky Joints article leads off by asking: “How often are you treated discourteously or made to feel inferior to others? Are you regularly called names, insulted, or harassed? Do people around you act as if you’re dishonest or untrustworthy?” There are no doubt numerous white people who are frequently treated discourteously and made to feel inferior to others; who are regularly called names, insulted, or harassed; and whom others regard as dishonest or untrustworthy. But the article is anxious to focus in on Whitey’s crimes. “These questions,” it informs us, “are part of the Everyday Discrimination Scale. Scoring highly on it indicates that you’re routinely subject to unfair treatment, perhaps because of your race or ethnicity.”
That “perhaps” is then made to bear a huge amount of weight, as the article then immediately jumps to assuming that there are massive levels of racial discrimination in the United States, and that this is making the victims ill: “Regular discrimination can certainly take a toll on your relationships, job prospects, and mental health, and growing evidence suggests that it also has implications for your physical health.” Arthritis is just one of the results: “In fact, a recent study found that individuals who report high rates of discrimination tend to have higher levels of some inflammatory markers in their blood as well as higher levels of specific bacteria in their microbiome. These differences, in turn, might put them at higher risk for inflammatory diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, among others.” Will Whitey never rest?
A ridiculous study, “How Discrimination Gets Under the Skin: Biological Determinants of Discrimination Associated With Dysregulation of the Brain-Gut Microbiome System and Psychological Symptoms,” was actually published in a scientific journal, Biological Psychiatry, in October 2022. It claims to have found that “discrimination was associated with anxiety, depression, and visceral sensitivity. Discrimination was associated with alterations of brain networks related to emotion, cognition and self-perception, and structural and functional changes in the gut microbiome.” You thought systemic racism was bad, and it’s even worse than you thought.
Related: Woke Biologists Claim Now Even Wild Animals Are Suffering From the Effects of Systemic Racism
Because of systemic racism, people of different races experienced different reactions to discrimination: “Among Black and Hispanic individuals, discrimination led to brain network changes consistent with psychological coping and increased systemic inflammation.” But Whitey (of course) did not suffer as much: “For White individuals, discrimination was related to anxiety but not inflammation, while for Asian individuals, the patterns suggest possible somatization and behavioral (e.g., dietary) responses to discrimination.” Watch for next month’s issue, in which will be published a study all about how guilt or innocence can be determined by making the accused grab a red-hot poker; those who are innocent will miraculously not have their skin burned off, thereby demonstrating their lack of guilt.
It’s no exaggeration. Woke academia has returned to the Middle Ages and substituted superstition for science, all the while preening about its adherence to “The Science.” In the absence of widespread or institutionalized racism in the United States (after all, it has been straight-out illegal for nearly sixty years now), pseudo-academics and Leftist ideologues claim to see racism and its effects anywhere and everywhere. They don’t even realize that they’re shooting themselves in the foot: if everything is racism, nothing is. As far as they’re concerned, no flight of intellectual fancy is too outlandish if it serves their agenda.
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