Diversity advocates have abandoned poor & minority children and focus on virtue signaling to their peers
I am more heartbroken about the poor child who won't graduate high school than a twitter list
As a progressive, I believe our society must make sure every child has a fair chance of achieving the American dream. That means kids who— because of the random luck of birth— are born in poor or abusive or neglectful households have good schools, good nutrition, and good medical care. I am willing to tax the wealthy to deliver these services to poor children, and I don’t think we do enough for them.
The reason the COVID-19 response broke my heart is that I know that these children will be further left behind. They will live shorter and broken lives because our experts were too stupid to know that cutting children’s safety net is far worse than the virus.
Ultimately, all kids got COVID anyway. Most got it before they were vaccinated, but poor & minority kids were also dealt a blow to their lives. School closure also did not slow community spread. It was a total blunder. The blame rests with us— a lot on Fauci & other misguided experts— but on all of us who stood by and did nothing.
I still believe that our society can do more to equal the playing field for children, particularly poor, disadvantaged and minority, and that is why I am a true progressive.
Sadly, my peers are not.
Recently, I saw yet another online prostration that reminded me why conservatives hate liberals. It’s because we care more about optics, our image than actually tackling the problem. (PS that’s why I can admit, as a liberal progressive, that Ron DeSantis did more for children during COVID than Gavin Newsom, who failed kids— except his own— who went to in person private school).
Here is what happened:
A trainee (PS - this is undoubtedly a smart and caring clinician— this post is not about this individual but the culture of medicine) asked to crowdsource a list of good educators on twitter, he went on to tweet a list of the popular names.
His list included, by my tally: 1 medical journal (4%), 6 white men (24%), 2 white women (16%), 12 minority men (48%), and 4 minority women (8%). The list included residents of low and middle income nations; children of immigrants, and African Americans. The author of the list describes himself as the son of immigrants. Then, a day or so later:
This isn’t a unique situation. It marks the fourth or fifth time I have seen a similar mea culpa on twitter.
During the worst moments of the fall of 2020, I worked both publicly and privately to push for school re-openings— the single greatest discriminatory action in a quarter century. On #MedTwitter, a bunch of rich doctors reported “their kids were doing fine” and “it’s a pandemic, after all,” and pushed to keep schools closed. All the while, pledging support to BLM.
Now, a trainee feels the need to apologize for an impromptu, ad hoc list of people to follow on twitter, which is 64% minority, but only 32% women.
What is wrong with us?
In a forthcoming publication, I will strengthen this case, and show a pervasive pattern of medicine’s relative indifference to the plight of poor, minority children in America, and obsession with the plight of faculty members in the academy. (Paper under review), but for now let me just remind my fellow progressives that we are failing.
We are policing things that don’t matter— twitter lists posted by trainees— and ignoring things that do matter—the unsafe living conditions, poor pre-K education, and limited nutrition programs for young children. Early life course interventions matter more than a trainee who decides to recommend others to follow on twitter.
If you want to argue that this is not an either-or, we can work on both projects. First, stay tuned for our paper, and second, time is limited. Every hour of outrage about a twitter list, is less time spent on young kids. And worse: having a brain that operates so poorly that it cannot make sense of data on masking, on school closure, and thinks this kid should apologize for a random list that a handful people read— is a liability. It threatens us going forward on all issues.
Virtue signaling
It does not escape my attention that medicine drifts further from science and reasoning, and is sucked into the gravitation pull of empty virtue signaling. We pushed masks because it is a symbol— not because the evidence is good. They failed by any convention measure. Boosting children— who don’t need boosters— and vaccinating kids who had covid— who don’t need vaccines— is another example of virtue signaling over a sober analysis of data. (PS many European nations have entirely abandoned vaccinating anyone <50).
A loud contingent pushes these views to signal to their colleagues that they are the “virtuous” people. Their favorite pastime is scolding each other for not being virtuous enough. Yes, this son of immigrants’ trainee’s list was 64% minority, but it was only 32% women. Let’s spend the day discussing that rather than the catastrophic blow we delivered to children in America— the single greatest discriminatory act in 25 years.
This will destroy us
The end of progressivism is when we all sit around in our mansions sipping wine and lamenting how our colleagues aren’t pure enough, and how our promotions are unfair because the only scholarship the university values is peer reviewed and not tweets— while poor children have their futures robbed of them, and we do nothing to heal that process. This behavior is sad. It isn’t liberal. It is self-destructive.
Many people in society have failed poor minority children, but the greatest failure is the incompetent progressive who pays lip service to actually caring.
Well said, thank you!
I think your post hints at a misunderstanding many “progressives” have about “conservatives.” For example, all the strongest social science for decades is clear that the single greatest risk factor a child faces for unhappiness/misery/suicide/abuse/addiction as an adult is… not being born poor, or being born a minority, but… being born outside a married two parent home. So, when conservatives try to celebrate marriage, it’s not because they’re heartless jerks who hate poor black kids, it’s because they genuinely believe this will help the very children you’re worried about!
Most conservatives understand that liberals care about children, just believe they go about it the wrong way, for example with government payments that incentivize fatherlessness. But liberals genuinely don’t believe that conservatives care about kids, they just think conservatives are evil heartless monsters. Maybe further reflections like yours above will help change that dynamic…
Gaty.substack.com
I’ve developed an immense respect for Dr. Prasad over the past year. His intellect and the honesty of his writing is refreshing with every read. I am troubled, however, by his characterizations of progressives and conservatives. The idea that the desire for poor children to have access to healthcare, food, and shelter makes one a “progressive” has the correlative that “conservatives” don’t want that. Perhaps conservatives could better be defined as former progressives who realized they wanted the same thing but were doing it wrong. The desire to improve life for both individuals and society is a common feature of both groups, but conservatives have recognized that the methods used by progressives invariably make things worse, over and over again, throughout history, because they’re proposing the wrong solutions. The common thread woven through all progressive movements is the desire to help the underdog. Nothing wrong with that. But with this as the raison d'etre, a lack of victims becomes an existential threat. The insatiable maw will always find another victim. it must. For years, women, minorities, and gay and lesbian individuals have undoubtedly benefited from fights against oppressive majorities. But as their plights have improved, the maw has grown hungry, looking for others. Transgender individuals, obese patients, failing students, “immune-suppressed” individuals, even criminals have taken starring roles as victims for the machine. Previously oppressed groups that would like to move on from victim status are told in ever more convoluted ways that they are, in fact, still victims. For every victim there must be two other characters – an oppressor, and a savior. If an oppressor is not at once obvious, one will be identified. Playing the savior role (always the progressive) generates the true precious commodity of this machine – self-aggrandizement, with its twin offspring of virtue signaling and cancel culture. Over time, grandchildren arrive as censorship, propaganda, and coercion. This “family” must protect its own, recursively, to ensure the continued production of the commodity – self-aggrandizement. Thus the “progressive” ideology leads directly to the numerous problems Dr. Prasad so persuasively calls out in his work. The conservative desires the same outcome. They examine the results of progressive actions, noting that the problem has worsened, and new problems have appeared – the frequent outcome of incorrect solutions. The recognition that the “victim” may share any responsibility for their situation, and that individual agency may have a larger effect on the outcome, results in the disastrous consequence of the victim ultimately helping themselves without the need of a savior. Unthinkable! We used to call this “tough love” – but love, nonetheless. None of this is new or surprising. A lifetime of brilliant scholarship and writing by Dr. Thomas Sowell – especially in his works, The Quest for Cosmic Justice, and The Vision of the Anointed have solved many of these puzzles for us. Dr. Prasad’s brilliant and honest writing, in my mind, classifies him as a conservative.