反种族主义者是错误的共同种族差异问题

The COVID-19 pandemic, which was supposed to be a “Great Equalizer,” has turned out to be anything but. Across the country, for every age, education level, and income bracket, the virus has disproportionately impacted black, indigenous, and Latino Americans.

吨他COVID-19大流行，这应该是一个“伟大的均衡器”，已被证明是什么，但。 在全国各地，对于每个年龄段，受教育程度和收入等级的人，该病毒对黑人，土著人和拉丁美洲人的影响均不成比例 。

Compared to whites and Asian Americans, they are catching the virus at higher rates, being hospitalized at higher rates, and dying at higher rates. The reasons are unclear, but the disparities are simply too large to ignore.

与白人和亚裔美国人相比，他们以更高的比率感染病毒，以更高的比率住院，并以更高的比率死亡。 原因尚不清楚，但差距太大了，不容忽视。

Or maybe not. For one group, ignoring these disparities isn’t just possible — it’s downright necessary. These are the anti-racialists.

或者可能不是。 对于一组人来说，忽略这些差异是不可能的，这是完全必要的。 这些是反种族主义者。

Broadly, anti-racialists believe that talking about race and racial categories, and in particular treating them as if they were real things or groups to which people belong, is itself a manifestation of racism. It makes no difference if our intentions are benign, for example if we are attempting to criticize racial inequalities. The moment we speak of race as a tangible social fact (e.g. “The gap in the homeownership rate between black and white households is the highest it has been in 50 years”), we are both illustrating and strengthening racism’s grip. This is “racecraft” — the transformation of something as fictitious as race into a violent social practice.

ð研究者广阔LY，反种族主义者认为，谈论种族和种族分类，特别是对待他们，好像他们是真实的事物或基团与人属于，本身就是种族主义的一种表现。 如果我们的意图是良性的，例如我们试图批评种族不平等，那没有什么区别。 当我们将种族视为有形的社会事实时(例如“黑人和白人家庭之间的房屋拥有率差距是50年来的最高水平 ”)，我们正在说明和加强种族主义的控制力。 这就是“ 赛车 ”-将诸如种族之类的虚构事物转变为暴力的社会习俗。

How, then, should we talk about COVID? Here is a disease that seems to have an obvious racial component. Isn’t that something we should discuss? Given the stakes, doesn’t it make sense, in this instance, to think or act in terms of race, if only to save people’s lives?

那么，我们应该如何谈论COVID？ 这是一种似乎具有明显种族成分的疾病。 那不是我们应该讨论的事情吗？ 考虑到这些风险，在这种情况下，考虑种族问题或仅仅为了挽救人们的生命就有意义吗？

The anti-racialists say no, but they’re wrong, and they’re wrong in a dangerous way. We’ll get to that. First, let’s try to understand their argument. Anti-racialists have a legitimate position and are capable of great insight, so it’s important to give them a fair hearing.

反种族主义者说不，但他们错了，而且以危险的方式错了。 我们将解决这个问题。 首先，让我们尝试了解他们的观点。 反种族主义者的立场是合法的，具有很强的洞察力，因此，对他们进行公正的聆听很重要。

如何成为反种族主义者 (How to Be an Anti-Racialist)

Anti-racialists begin by arguing that the focus on race is misleading. During the pandemic’s early days, for example, Coleman Hughes noted that simply being black or Latino does not make a person more likely to catch or die from COVID. Rather, race functions as a proxy for some other set of factors (e.g. higher rates of underlying health problems, lack of access to quality health care, etc.) that merely correlate with race. And if we “are going to discuss underlying risk factors, we should discuss them directly rather than immediately using race as a proxy.”

反种族主义者首先争论种族问题是一种误导。 例如，在大流行初期，科尔曼·休斯(Coleman Hughes) 指出 ， 黑人或拉丁裔不会使人更容易被COVID感染或死亡。 相反，种族只是其他一些与种族相关的因素(例如更高的潜在健康问题，无法获得优质医疗保健等)的替代物。 如果我们“要讨论潜在的风险因素，我们应该直接讨论它们，而不是立即使用种族作为代理。”

A focus on race, Hughes goes on to say, makes about as much sense as focusing on religion. “If anyone bothers to look, there will probably be disparities between Catholics and Protestants. Yet no one will feel the need to mention these at a press conference, and our public health efforts will not suffer as a result.”

休斯接着说，关注种族与关注宗教一样有意义。 “如果有人打扰一下，天主教徒和新教徒之间可能会有差距。 然而，没有人会觉得有必要在新闻发布会上提及这些，因此我们的公共卫生工作不会因此受到影响。”

Zaid Jilani agrees: “A young, healthy African-American with great health-care coverage who telecommutes every day and has groceries delivered to his door is not automatically at higher risk of contracting the virus or succumbing to it than an elderly white man who rides the subway to work every morning to work at an essential business where he interacts with hundreds of people a day.” To suppose otherwise risks “flattening the image of an entire group and misinterpreting a social problem.”

扎伊德·吉拉尼(Zaid Jilani) 同意 ：“年轻，健康的非洲裔美国人每天都可远程办公，并拥有杂货，并且可以将食品运到他的家，因此，与骑车的白人老人相比，患上这种病毒或遭受其屈服的风险并不高。每天早上在地铁上班，从事一项必不可少的工作，每天与数百人互动。” 否则，冒着“弄乱整个群体的形象并曲解社会问题”的风险。

After all, Jilani explains, many people who are black or Latino will never catch the disease; many who are not black or Latino will. So any response that focuses on race will inevitably “end up over-delivering social concern and care for the person who faces little risk and under-delivering social concern and care to the person who faces great risk.” Better instead to identify the actual risk factors at work — e.g. age, class, geographic location, form of employment — and deploy our resources accordingly. It is these multiple and intersecting forms of vulnerability that drive COVID disparities, not something so crude a category as race.

吉拉尼解释说，毕竟，许多黑人或拉丁美洲人永远不会感染这种疾病。 许多不是黑人或拉丁裔的人会的。 因此，任何针对种族的回应都将不可避免地“结束对风险较小的人的社会关注和关怀，而对风险较大的人的社会关注和关怀不足。” 最好是确定工作中的实际风险因素(例如年龄，阶级，地理位置，就业形式)并相应地部署我们的资源。 导致COVID差异的正是这些多重且相交的漏洞形式，而不是像种族这样粗糙的东西。

Let’s call this the Intersectionality Argument.

我们称其为交叉性参数。

The anti-racialists’ second argument focuses on the language of race and its potential effects on public attitudes or behavior. We’ll call it the Political Correctness Argument. The claim, essentially, is that even if race were an analytically useful category for describing victims of COVID, it should still be avoided on pragmatic grounds.

反种族主义者的第二个论点集中在种族的语言及其对公众态度或行为的潜在影响上。 我们将其称为“政治正确性论点”。 从本质上说，即使种族是描述COVID受害者的分析上有用的类别，也应出于务实的理由避免种族。

There are a number of arguments along these lines. Some are quite extreme, such as the claim that radical sociologists will try to use racial framing to take over public health organizations. Such conspiracy theorists may be safely dismissed.

这些方面有很多论点。 有些极端，例如激进社会学家将试图利用种族框架接管公共卫生组织的说法 。 这样的阴谋理论家可能会被安全解雇。

But there are more plausible objections as well. For example, Jilani urges journalists to abandon the rhetoric of race and adopt more inclusive language instead, lest white Americans lose interest in helping those affected. And Thomas Chatterton Williams worries that if the virus becomes racialized in the public imagination, “you end up with a bunch of white people saying that [it] doesn’t affect them and behaving in all types of ways that actually end up spreading it.” Indeed, Williams suggests that one of the reasons why America’s outbreak is so bad is because “the disease became widely racialized in the public conversation,” leading to “a lack of vigilance that set in in certain white communities, especially in red states.”

但是，还有更多合理的反对意见。 例如，吉拉尼(Jilani)敦促新闻记者放弃种族言论，而是采用更具包容性的措辞，以免美国白人失去对帮助受影响人群的兴趣。 托马斯·查特顿·威廉姆斯(Thomas Chatterton Williams) 担心 ，如果这种病毒在公众的想象中变得种族化，“您最终会得到一群白人说，[它]不会影响到他们，并且会以各种最终导致其传播的方式表现出来。 ” 确实，威廉姆斯认为，美国爆发如此严重的原因之一是“这种疾病在公开谈话中被广泛种族化了”，导致“某些白人社区，尤其是红色州缺乏警惕性”。

工作竞赛确实 (The Work Race Does)

What to make of these arguments? First of all, I want to applaud the anti-racialists for thinking intersectionally. And I agree that political correctness can be an important tool for mitigating social harms. However, neither of these arguments is persuasive, and their weaknesses tell us something important about the limitations of anti-racialism.

这些论据如何构成？ 首先，我要赞扬反种族主义者相互思考。 我同意政治正确性可以成为减轻社会危害的重要工具。 但是，这些论点都不具有说服力，它们的弱点也告诉我们关于反种族主义的局限性的重要信息。

Consider the Intersectionality Argument. Jilani says that given “the thousands of factors that decide a person’s health outcomes, we are likely to see wide variations in how people within racial groups are impacted by the virus.”

考虑交叉点参数。 吉拉尼说，鉴于“成千上万的那些决定一个人的健康状况，我们很可能会看到怎样的种族群体内的人被病毒影响的大范围变化的因素。”

That’s true, and indeed is a standard defense of intersectional analysis. However, this does not mean, as Jilani goes on to claim, that race is not an epidemiologically useful category.

没错，并且确实是交叉分析的标准辩护。 但是，这并不意味着像Jilani继续声称的那样，种族不是流行病学上有用的类别。

After all, nobody disputes the value in analyzing and addressing COVID using the category of age, even though not all elderly people will die of COVID, nor will all those who die be old. Being elderly is not itself a causal variable. The cause is a weakened immune system, which imperfectly correlates with age. But because identifying individuals who are immunocompromised on a mass scale is so cumbersome, age is a convenient proxy.

毕竟，即使不是所有的老年人都会死于COVID，也不是所有的死者都老了，但没有人会质疑使用年龄类别分析和处理COVID的价值。 老年人本身并不是因果变量。 原因是免疫系统减弱 ，与年龄不完全相关。 但是，因为要识别大规模免疫受损的个体是如此繁琐，所以年龄是一种方便的替代手段。

An anti-racialist might respond by noting that the association between COVID deaths and age is biological, whereas the association with race is socially contingent. But that is irrelevant for evaluating what matters in this debate: whether the association is meaningful.

反种族主义者可能会通过指出COVID死亡与年龄之间的关联是生物学的而作出回应，而与种族的关联则在社会上是偶然的。 但这与评估这场辩论中重要的事情无关：关联是否有意义。

To see what I mean, let’s return to Hughes’s point about Catholics and Protestants. He intends this to be an absurd hypothetical, as if there were no plausible scenario where religious disparities in COVID cases might be worth investigating.

要了解我的意思，让我们回到休斯关于天主教徒和新教徒的观点。 他希望这是一个荒谬的假设，好像没有什么合理的情况值得在COVID案件中调查宗教差异。

But not only are such scenarios plausible, they actually happened during the pandemic’s early days. One of New York’s first major outbreaks occurred in its Orthodox Jewish community, and culturally specific characteristics of that religious group help explain why. Something similar happened during the 2018–19 measles epidemic, which also had a disparate impact on Orthodox Jews. It was only by focusing on those disparities — and, importantly, by taking the category of religion seriously — that researchers were able to identify the epidemic’s source, explain its spread, and mount a response.

但是这种情况不仅是合理的，而且实际上是在大流行初期发生的。 纽约最早的一次重大疫情之一发生在其东正教犹太人社区 ，该宗教团体的特定文化特征有助于解释其原因。 在2018-19年度麻疹流行期间发生了类似的情况，这也对东正教犹太人产生了不同的影响。 只有关注这些差异，而且重要的是，认真对待宗教类别，研究人员才能够确定该流行病的根源 ， 解释其传播并做出React 。

As for Hughes’s hypothetical disparity between Catholics and Protestants, a curious epidemiologist might wish to investigate how different denominations handle the offering of Communion, how church choirs operate as a disease vector, or whether the organizational structure of Catholicism makes social distancing easier to mandate. Or maybe not. We don’t know, which is precisely why it would be so foolish to automatically assume the irrelevance of religion as a category.

至于休斯在天主教徒和新教徒之间的假设差异，一位好奇的流行病学家可能希望调查不同教派如何处理圣餐 ，教堂合唱团如何作为疾病媒介起作用，或者天主教的组织结构是否使社会疏离更容易执行 。 或者可能不是。 我们不知道，这就是为什么自动将宗教与类别无关就如此愚蠢的原因。

Race is no different. Indeed, one of the reasons public health professionals use racial categories in their COVID analysis is because we still don’t fully understand the relevant risk factors. Clearly age is important, as are class, gender, housing density, health, and education. But even after controlling for all these factors, the race-based disparities in hospitalization and death do not disappear. Why not? No one quite knows. But so long as COVID insists — via systemic racism, personal choice, or whatever — on endowing racial categories with epidemiological significance, it would be foolish to willfully ignore them.

种族没有什么不同。 确实，公共卫生专业人员在COVID分析中使用种族类别的原因之一是因为我们仍未完全了解相关的风险因素。 显然，年龄，阶级，性别，住房密度，健康和教育同样重要。 但是即使控制了所有这些因素， 住院和死亡中基于种族的差异也不会消失。 为什么不？ 没有人知道。 但是，只要COVID坚持通过系统性种族主义，个人选择或其他方式坚持赋予流行病学意义的种族类别，则无视它们是愚蠢的。

像这样说 (Telling it Like it is)

Similar problems arise with the Political Correctness Argument. Is there really a danger, as Williams suggests, that white people will behave more recklessly if they learn of COVID’s racialized impact? It’s possible, though I don’t think we have sufficient evidence to say, as Williams does, that it is “pretty well established.”

政治正确性争论也出现了类似的问题。 正如威廉姆斯所建议的那样，如果真的了解白人对COVID种族歧视的影响，他们的行为会更加鲁behave吗？ 尽管我认为我们没有足够的证据像威廉姆斯那样说这是“相当成熟的”，但有可能。

Regardless, this logic works just as well (if not better) with the disease’s disparate impact on the elderly, which has misled many young people into believing they’re invulnerable. Would Williams have us not collect or publicize age-related data in response? Or would he instead have public health officials gather and share all the relevant information they can, regardless of how it might make others feel?

无论如何，这种逻辑与该疾病对老年人的不同影响一样有效(如果不是更好的话)，这使许多年轻人误以为他们是无辜的。 威廉姆斯会不会回应我们不收集或公布与年龄有关的数据吗？ 还是他会让公共卫生官员搜集并分享他们能获得的所有相关信息，而不管它会使别人感到如何？

It is telling that Williams compares the U.S. unfavorably to France, where researchers are legally barred from collecting race-based data. Williams suggests that this lack of official racialization is one of the reasons why France’s outbreak is less severe than America’s.

事实证明，威廉姆斯将美国比作法国，法国则被禁止研究人员收集基于种族的数据。 威廉姆斯认为，这种缺乏官方种族化的现象是法国疫情没有美国严重的原因之一。

Set aside the fact that France has one of the world’s highest case fatality rates and is in the midst of succumbing to a second wave. Is its colorblind policy really something to celebrate?

撇开一个事实，法国是世界上病死率最高的国家之一，并且正在屈服于第二波热潮 。 它的色盲政策真的值得庆祝吗？

French doctors don’t think so. They say it has made their jobs more difficult, and that at-risk patients are slipping through the cracks as a result. French journalists warn that in the absence of hard data, rumors and demagoguery are filling the void. And epidemiologists complain that because they must feign colorblindness, they cannot use the tools they already have to fight the virus.

法国医生不这么认为。 他们说，这使他们的工作更加困难，因此，处于危险之中的患者正在从裂缝中溜走。 法国记者警告说，由于缺乏可靠的数据，谣言和煽动性言论填补了空缺。 流行病学家抱怨说，由于必须假装色盲，因此他们无法使用已经必须的工具来对抗这种病毒。

“The [survey] instruments are all there,” lamented one researcher. But due to political sensitivities, “we don’t use them sufficiently.” No wonder critics in France are calling it political correctness run amok.

一位研究人员感叹道：“ [调查]工具都在那里。” 但是由于政治敏感性，“我们没有充分利用它们。” 难怪法国的批评家称其为政治正确性。

可疑的速记 (A Dubious Shorthand)

The anti-racialists’ intuition makes sense: if you want less racism, stop talking about race. But that’s all it is — an intuition. Whether it’s an effective remedy depends on the context and available evidence. And sometimes the evidence disagrees.

反种族主义者的直觉是有道理的：如果您希望减少种族主义，请停止谈论种族。 但这就是全部–直觉。 它是否是有效的补救措施取决于上下文和可用的证据。 有时证据不一致 。

So it is with COVID. Jettisoning racial categories, and calling on journalists, politicians, or scientists to cease talking in terms of race, would be counter-productive. Not because race is biologically real (it most certainly is not), but because it is meaningful. Society has made it meaningful. We’re seeing that, right now, in hospital beds and doctor’s offices and obituary pages across America.

COVID也是如此。 粗化种族类别，并呼吁记者，政治家或科学家停止谈论种族，将适得其反。 不是因为种族在生物学上是真实的(最肯定不是)，而是因为它是有意义的。 社会取得了它的意义。 目前，我们正在全美的医院病床，医生办公室和ob告页上看到这一点。

More nuanced scholars acknowledge this fact, and ask that instead of abandoning all talk of COVID’s racial disparities, we carefully frame those disparities within larger discussions of socioeconomic inequality. They also suggest emphasizing that, while these disparities may correspond to racial categories, the thing those categories are meant to describe — a race — does not in fact exist. It is, rather, a “dubious shorthand.”

更多细微的学者承认了这一事实 ，并要求我们不要放弃所有关于COVID种族差异的说法，而应在社会经济不平等的更大讨论中仔细地将这些差异归为框架。 他们还建议强调，尽管这些差异可能与种族类别相对应，但实际上这些种族本来要描述的东西( 种族 )并不存在。 而是“ 可疑的速记” 。

All of this is quite sensible, but even here I would urge caution. There is still so much about the pandemic we don’t know. Public health officials and policymakers are scrambling to respond with only partial data and limited resources. Right now, we need a shorthand. This means taking race seriously, and allowing racial categories to inform our public health response.

所有这些都是很明智的，但是即使在这里我也要谨慎。 关于大流行的事情我们还有很多未知数 。 公共卫生官员和政策制定者争先恐后地仅提供部分数据和有限的资源。 现在，我们需要一个速记。 这意味着认真对待种族，并允许种族类别告知我们的公共卫生对策。

Yes, race is socially constructed. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter, and it would be reckless to pretend otherwise.

是的，种族是社会建构的。 但这并不意味着没有关系，并且假装否则是鲁re的。

翻译自: https://arcdigital.media/anti-racialists-are-wrong-covid-racial-disparities-matter-1655239608c6