All other things being equal, should black Americans be given more Social Security (SS) benefits? A college dean may think so, claiming that the program’s “structural inequities” shortchange blacks. And what is the problem, according to Thomas LaVeist, the dean of Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine?
White people live longer, which allows them to collect benefits for a greater period of time.
LaVeist concluded that we have to “intervene” in how the “system operates” as a remedy but provided no specificity, such as whether we should strive to lengthen blacks’ lifespans, shorten whites’, or calculate SS benefits based on quota.
Oddly, the dean also neglected to mention if any possible remedy would address the phenomena whereby women, Asian-descent Americans, and Latinos live longer than, respectively, men and whites.
LaVeist made his comments while being interviewed by Washington Post Live reporter Akilah Johnson (who explores “the effect of racism and social inequality on health”) at the paper’s recent “Health Equity” event. As Fox News reports:
“So we have a policy, we have Social Security program established in 1935,” he said. “This program was established to help address poverty, that many people after retirement were not able to — to basically live.”
LaVeist then suggested that if all other factors are hypothetically the same, White people in America will benefit more from Social Security because they tend to live longer than Black people.
“The program was developed, but if you look at the differences in life expectancy, if you say you have a Black worker, White worker, they begin working at the same day, at the same job, for the same company, they make the same salary, which might not always be the case, but in this example, they make the same salary. They paid the exact same amount of money into the Social Security system, and they both retire the same day,” he said.
“Because the White person on average is going to live longer than the Black person, there’s going to be a difference in how much they’re going to get out of that system that they paid into,” LaVeist continued.
“I’m not saying the Social Security is inherently racist, but … that it has an inequitable outcome because of the health inequities, and this is just a good way to demonstrate how that operates,” the professor elaborated.
LaVeist went on to emphasize that this “structural inequity … doesn’t require any individual to have racist beliefs…. It just simply is the way the system operates, and if we don’t intervene, it will continue to function this way.”
This is where a diligent reporter would lick his chops and ask what this intervention should be. But not the Post’s Johnson. Instead, LaVeist got to talk about how “health care resources,” “high-quality supermarkets or restaurants,” and “environmental hazards are not distributed equally.” Of course, this is as significant as saying that height or physical strength isn’t distributed equally. Equality is not a thing of this world.
Quality can be, though. It certainly wasn’t reflected in LaVeist’s analysis, however. That is to say, whenever the “structural racism/inequity” drum is beaten, whites’ state of being is always used as the yardstick, thereby lending the impression that “systemic racism” allows them to enjoy better outcomes than any other group. This is despite the fact that by every or most every possible measure — income, education, health, etc. — whites lag behind Asian-descent Americans (AdAs).
The SS issue is no exception, either. It’s absolutely true that whites’ life expectancy (78.9) exceeds that of blacks (75.3), yet it’s also the case that AdAs (at 85.7) outlive whites by almost seven years. Even Latinos (at 82.2) live longer, despite being poorer than whites and often exhibiting greater social ills. (Preceding statistics are as of 2019.) Moreover, it could be noted that blacks outlive poor Appalachian whites.
What this means is that, under LaVeist’s theory, whites endure the stated consequences of “structural inequity” because, in general, they can’t collect SS for as long as AdAs and Latinos can. So why, then, is the dean using whites’ lifespan as the gold standard here?
Because talking about Asian or Hispanic “privilege” is more likely to get you canceled than interviewed softball-style by the Post.
What’s more, revealing all the relevant statistics would expose the race hustlers’ anti-white, anti-American agenda for the malarkey it is. But this isn’t the only deception evident here — “equity” is another.
Having replaced “equality” (which was bad enough) as a favored left-wing buzzword and rallying cry not that many years ago, “equity” is a euphemism for officially sanctioned discrimination ostensibly geared toward achieving equal outcomes. As a commenter under the Fox article put it, “Equity = Communism, most people simply do not understand that.”
If this sounds extreme, consider a notorious 2020 Democratic campaign ad (below) in which Kamala Harris explains, as she phrases it, the “big difference between equality and equity.”
Harris concludes with, “Equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.” This is, of course, just a rebranding of the communist equality-of-outcome demand.
It’s also a lie. Harris (and other pseudo-elites) doesn’t want to be in the “same place” as the rest of us; she wants to be ruling, wielding power and wallowing in wealth while the peons deal with equality of privation.
Extreme focus on equity or equality in Social Security, or anything else, only guarantees that life will become less social and less secure.
