To believe that racism or genetics explains all the disparities of outcomes (whether health, income, incarceration rates) for minorities, or that sexism explains why women earn less than men, is akin to believing that that both birds and airplanes fly solely because they have wings. It demonstrates a childish level of thinking which among adults is increasingly common among the Left, and particularly among the educated elite in pedagogic circles which ensures that these mental deficiencies are propagated amongst emerging generations.
Our educators ought to know better, and probably do, which begs the question: why do they teach what is so refutably false and thereby spread idiocy? The answer is the same reason why political leaders also employ these fallacies when they have access to the best experts to explain the errors; power, pure and simple. Idiots are useful, are easier to control, direct, and exploit. We don't educate nowadays, we indoctrinate. We teach students what to think, not how to think. It is much easier to amass power when your populace believes the comforting lies of Critical Theory rather than actually be able to think critically.
Thomas Sowell saw that "It is amazing how many people think that they can answer an argument by attributing bad motives to those who disagree with them. Using this kind of reasoning, you can believe or not believe anything about anything, without having to bother to deal with facts or logic." He also said that "It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance." Perhaps nobody has done a better, more well-researched job than Sowell of proving the points that a) correlation is not causation, and b) that the 'residual fallacy' is one of the grand non sequiturs of the time and perhaps the most pernicious mode of political prestidigitation because it not only blames the wrong thing, its solutions only exacerbate the problem. Imagine a remedy that doesn't even reduce the symptoms but which further spreads the disease. The Left has a long and sad history of hurting precisely those they purport to help. As Wilhelm Röpke marvelled, "the failures of the Left are so numerous and blatant that it is astonishing that the underlying theory seems to digest these failures without losing prestige. It is even more astonishing that the protagonists of this approach are so utterly unrepentant." But like Sowell has said, it is so easy to be wrong―and to persist in being wrong―when the costs of being wrong are paid by others.
Aside from the sinister desire to cast whites as devils, the inhumanity of treating blacks like abstracted masses who share the same fate because of skin color rather than as an aggregate of individuals with free agency, and the stupidity and soft bigotry of absolving blacks of responsibility for their own actions by then making whites fully responsible for black uplift, the Residual Fallacy is the primary intellectual error that is made when blaming health outcomes on systemic racism, so let's examine that using a less-racially charged example.
The residual fallacy, Sowell says, is as common in the highest courts of the land as on the political platform or in the media or academe. At the heart of the fallacy is the notion that you really can hold variables constant―"controlling" the variables, as statisticians say―in practice as well as in theory.
Male-female differences in income are often likewise said to prove discrimination because men and women with the "same" education receive different pay. Suppose, for example, that we try to hold education constant by examining income statistics just for those women and men who have graduated from college. There is still a sex difference in income at this level of aggregation, and if we are content to stop here―the choice of stopping point being inherently arbitrary―then we may choose to call the residual differences in income evidence of sex discrimination.
However, if we recognize that college graduates include people who go on to postgraduate study, and that postgraduate education also influences income, we may wish to go on to the next level of aggregation and compare women and men who did post graduate study. Now we will find that the proportion of women and men with postgraduate degrees differs from the proportions with college degrees―women slightly outnumbering men at the bachelor's degree level, but being outnumbered by men by more than two-to-one at the master's degree level, and by 59 percent at the Ph.D. level. Clearly, when we compare college-educated women and men, which includes those who went on to postgraduate work, we are still comparing apples to oranges because their total education is not the same.
Suppose, then, that we press on to the next level of aggregation in search of comparability, and look only at women and men who went all the way to Ph.D. Once more, we will discover not only disparities but changing ratios of disparities. Although women receive 37 percent of all Ph. D.s, the fields in which they receive them differ radically from the fields in which men receive their Ph.D.s―with the men being more heavily concentrated in the more mathematical, scientific, and remunerative (better paid) fields. While women receive nearly half of the Ph.D.s in the social sciences and more than half in education, men receive more than 80 percent of the Ph.D.s in the natural sciences and more than 90 percent of the Ph.D.s in engineering. We are still comparing apples and oranges.
Some specialized studies have permitted even finer breakdowns, but sex disparities in education continue in these finer breakdowns as well. For example, if we examine only those women and men who received Ph.D.s in the social services, it turns out that women were more likely to be in sociology and men in economics―the latter being the more remunerative (better paid) field. Moreover, even within economics, there have been very large male-female differences as to what proportion of the economics Ph.D.s were specifically in econometrics―a difference in a proportion of ten men to one woman. In short, we have still not held constant the education we set out to hold constant and which we could have said that we had held constant by stopping the disaggregation at any point along the way.
AND WHICH WE COULD HAVE SAID THAT WE HAD HELD CONSTANT BY SIMPLY STOPPING THE DISAGGREGATION AT ANY POINT ALONG THE WAY. — Sowell
While the disaggregation process must stop at some point, whether because the statistics are not broken down any further or because time is not limitless, the fatal fallacy is to assume that all factors left unexamined must be equal, so that all remaining differences in outcome can be attributed to discrimination. In other words, having found causal disparities at every level of aggregation―and often changing ratios of such disparities, as well―it is arbitrarily assumed that the causal disparities end where our disaggregation ends, so that all remaining differences in reward must be due to discrimination.
Innumerable historical and cultural differences, found among many groups in countries around the world―as the numbered examples listed above suggest―make statistical disparities fall far short of proof of discrimination. Such data may be accepted as evidence or proof in courts of law but, logically speaking, such data prove nothing. They are "Aha!" statistics."
So to blame racism for health outcomes among blacks is not only to strip each black individual of his personal dignity by lumping them into a disaggregated abstracted mass in order to make them a political weapon through groupthink (which frankly, to mind, is the worst form of racism), it is also a terrible logical error of not accounting for a myriad of causal factors, and conflating causation with correlation.
For example, one of the factors that is ignored by the race-baiters is simply prosperity. Poor people, regardless of color, have worse health outcomes than wealthy people. This should not be too surprising because health care is expensive. Now I realize that progressives think that health care can be made free with a magic wand by waving personal responsibility and putting the long arm of government in charge of dispensing it, but where government runs health care, rationing of care is necessary and so the people who truly need it, don't get it.
As Sally Pipes says, "The problem is one of supply and demand. Single-payer systems offer "free" care, so patients have no incentive to moderate their demand for care. But government cannot procure enough supply to meet that demand without bankrupting taxpayers. Government officials' only option is to ration care."
Now, try to guess who must accept government rationed health care in America rather than enjoy the best care money can buy? If you said anything other than the poor, you're an idiot. It makes no difference whether you are poor and white or poor and black. This explains why the poor whites in the hollers of Appalachia have similar health outcomes to poor blacks in the hood of Chicago. But people who look for signs of racism everywhere because it confirms their bias (another logical fallacy; confirmation bias) will always be able to find it where it doesn't really exist to the magnitude they believe it does and blame it solely for all disparities. Furthermore, people who grope for racial grievances can be relied upon not to look at other factors which destroy their simplistic and erroneous theory.
Race-bating is a cheap, easy, and frankly wicked way to think about serious problems and to go through life, but it is increasingly prevalent in these days of hubristic wokeness. It is a convenient bogyman which enables the woke to remain asleep about a slew of more important factors, and it enables politicians to amass even more power, all while actually harms blacks most by stripping them of their human dignity by lumping them into an abstracted mass and telling them all that they are all victims who share the same fate, and that nothing they do individually will make any difference.
Doing so not only makes them 'contingent people' dependent on what others do for them, it robs them of their inherent dignity, initiative and hope. Is it any wonder that such a people would take a similar approach to their health and well-being?