House Energy and Commerce Witness Calls for Elimination of ‘Whiteness’

The House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on Wednesday featuring a witness who calls for the elimination of “whiteness.”

The subcommittee on health will hold a hearing titled, “Health Care Inequality: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in COVID-19 and the Health Care System.”

The hearing will detail the alleged racial and ethnic disparities in America’s healthcare system. House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone (D-NJ) claimed in a memo about the hearing “studies also show that racial and ethnic minorities receive lower-quality health care even when insurance status or severity of conditions are comparable.”

The hearing will include three witnesses to testify about the subject:

• Rhea Boyd, MD, MPH. Boyd is a pediatrician and child health advocate at Palo Alto Medical Foundation.
• National Medical Association President Oliver T. Brooks, MD.
• Avik Roy, president of the foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity.

Boyd’s testimony may enflame controversy as House staffers and even the Wall Street Journal recently raised the alarm over Boyd’s inflammatory remarks.

For instance, in her prepared testimony to the committee, she cries afoul about the perceived injustice that white Americans make more money than Hispanic or black Americans. She wrote, “In 2016, for every dollar of income white households received, Latinx and Black households earned only 73 cents and 61cents, respectively. And for every dollar of wealth white 15 households have, Latinx and Black households have 7 and 6 pennies, respectively.”

In the medical journal, the Lancet, Boyd makes controversial remarks about eliminating “whiteness all together.”

Boyd wrote in January 2020:

This entanglement between access and scarcity, privilege and loss, means white people’s unearned advantages have always been tethered to a legacy of untold deaths. This is not the result of an emotional positioning, but a structural one. In Dying of Whiteness, Metzl intricately outlines this structural framework but too often anchors it to an emotional foundation his analysis both critiques and depends on. This is perhaps why his conclusion is to “Promote more healthy and selfreflective frameworks…of structural whiteness” when the only solution is to eliminate whiteness all together.

[…]

The solution to defending whiteness is not self-reflection. It is not a difficult conversation. And it is not centring white emotions, however distressing they may be. The solution is those who can become white must summon the courage to unbecome white and then to eliminate whiteness, “the system, the way of life, the philosophy [producing] murderers”. [Emphasis added]

Pundits and other writers have sounded the alarm over Boyd’s antiwhite “radicalism.”

James Freeman, an assistant editor for the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, wrote an op-ed in January denouncing Boyd’s Lancet article.

Freeman cited Boyd’s piece, which read, “… as the present historical moment observes a rise in white deaths, the connections between white racial terror and premature death appear lost in public and academic discourse.”

Boyd also wrote, “Metzl characterises white liberties that endanger white lives or imperil white futures as ‘dying of whiteness’… At times, Metzl artfully articulates and historicises the racist origins of white interest in firearm fanaticism and ‘small government’ politics.”

“Parents writing tuition checks may cling to a hope that the political radicalism of modern academia is largely concentrated in soft majors invented to highlight various grievances,” Freeman wrote.

“But a new story from one of the world’s best known medical journals confirms that no area of scholarly inquiry is safe,” he added.

Freeman noted that Boyd also wrote:

… the disaggregated drivers of all-cause white mortality (conditions such as suicide, chronic liver disease, and drug and alcohol poisoning) have been described as ‘diseases of despair’ rather than diseases of disproportionate opportunity (to wield firearms) and access (to prescription opiates).

Freeman asked rhetorically, “Patients suffer from mental illness and addiction because they are privileged?”

A House GOP aide told Breitbart News that Boyd’s inflammatory remarks distract from the House’s important work, such as combatting the opioid crisis. The aide said:

Now is the time for real, commonsense and bipartisan solutions to the serious challenges our country is facing. Providing a platform for a medical professional who claims that mental illness, substance use disorder and suicide can be explained away by a person’s privilege runs counter to all the bipartisan work the House has done to tackle many important issues, especially when it comes to a crisis like the opioid epidemic that claims, on average, 130 Americans every day. Congress must come together to ensure all Americans have access to quality health care, no matter their zip code or skin color.

“Unfortunately, the posture for this hearing underscores just how out of touch House Democrats are with the American people and further highlights their desire to put political expediency above all else,” the aide added.