The once-venerable Lancet medical journal has dedicated an entire article to the impact of “structural racism” on iron deficiency anemia.
“Anaemia is not equally distributed by ‘race,’” the Lancet asserted, and rich and poor soils “are a metaphor for structural racism, which results in differential access to the goods, services, and opportunities of society by ‘race.’”
The “disparity in iron deficiency anaemia by place and ‘race’ is a biological indicator of the differential access to goods, services, and opportunities,” it declared, and differential access “to a healthy diet, education, and a clean environment are compounded by differential exposure to infections, poverty, and stress, and differential access to health care, particularly for heavy menstrual bleeding.”
Not only is “structural racism” to blame for higher rates of anemia among black women worldwide, the journal contends this difference is also fueled by another progressive bogeyman: the Patriarchy.
Due to “the patriarchal taboo surrounding menstruation,” it argues, “many women do not receive effective care for heavy menstrual bleeding.”
Curiously for a medical journal, the article spends little time delving into the real biological and genetic factors behind different rates of anemia among blacks and whites.
The American Journal of Epidemiology, for example, found in 2009 that anemia was 3.3 times more common in blacks than whites, even “after adjusting for demographic variables, socioeconomic factors, and comorbid conditions.”
Moreover, sickle cell anemia (SCA), a genetic condition that affects red blood cells, can affect anyone but black people are at a higher genetic risk for the disease, which has nothing to do with “structural racism” or any other sociological construct.
Undeterred in its crusade to pin anemia on racism, the Lancet alleges that differences in anemia between black and white populations “have conventionally and mistakenly been understood in medicine as inherent biological differences between ‘races.’”
It then goes on to acknowledge that there are “genetic contributions” to iron status but adds that “the social construct of ‘race’ is a poor proxy for this variability.”
Rather than “tackling differential access to a healthy life, systemic racism means disparities in iron deficiency anaemia have for too long been framed as biological differences, invoking genetic explanations with different anaemia thresholds for Black women,” it proclaims.
“The failure to recognise the racism underpinning differences in anaemia by ‘race’ manifests as a stubborn intergenerational disadvantage that demands our urgent attention,” it concludes.
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