Another benefit of white male privilege: High rates of brain cancer!

Liberals instruct us that white male privilege is all-powerful and pervasive. Then they compare black and white statistical differences to support their contention. Of course, they are very selective since blacks and other so-called oppressed groups come out ahead all the time.

Take, for instance, brain cancer. This new study of the US between 2000 and 2014 (almost 250k cancer patients were identified) reported that the incidence of glioblastomas--the most common (and very deadly) type of brain cancer--is around 1.5 times higher in men than women. The chart below shows that whites face more than twice the risk of getting a glioblastoma compared to all minority racial groups. (Even Hispanics who identify as white have a significantly lower rate.)

Not only do whites suffer from higher rates of brain cancer, the study concluded they are significantly less likely to survive for 1 or 5 years, so there is no evidence that whites get health care biased in their favor.

If oppression by whites produces these kinds of results for minorities, please God turn me brown!

Senator McCain might be saying it's not so bad to be black

US Senator John McCain is near the end. Last year he was struck with an aggressive brain tumor, a glioblastoma, that carries with it a strong likelihood of not surviving for very long. 

As a documented in a recent post, whites face more than twice the risk of developing a glioblastoma (as well as other types of brain cancer) compared to all minority groups, and the risk for men is significantly higher than for women. 

Nature does not seem to be cooperating with the liberal claim that minorities and women always get the short end of the stick due to "white supremacy." 

The theory much more consistent with the data is that evolution has produced group differences which sometimes advantage one group, sometimes another. Social conditions might magnify biological differences, but differences are rooted in genes. 

After bouts of skin cancer and now this awful, deadly brain cancer, Senator McCain might be saying it's not so bad to be black.

Study: More African ancestry predicts diabetes among blacks

You know a social problem becomes serious and legit when we discover--and only when we discover--that it is hitting blacks disproportionately. Brain cancer--not a major problem.  It hits whites worse.

Now that we see that WuFlu is bad in black communities, we get the same old lament about omnipresent anti-black racism. Heck, you'll see it on Fox about as much as anywhere. The American people can never hear enough that disease is colorblind... but we are not.

Let's see what actual scientific research has to say about one of the conditions putting you at risk of Covid-19, diabetes:

The risk of type 2 diabetes is twice as high for blacks as whites, even after adjusting for  socioeconomic status (SES). This suggests that genetic factors may help explain the racial gap.

The researchers in the linked study conducted an admixture analysis using 2,189 ancestry-informative markers in 7,021 African Americans. The group that was highest in African ancestry was 1.3 times more likely to have diabetes than the lowest ancestry group. This was true after adjustment for age, sex, body mass index (BMI), and SES.

Race is genetic, and it matters, people. But you'll never hear that on Fox.


(Hat tip to Greg Cochran on the article.)

The phenomenon of the "black angel"

From City Journal:

The first signs of the spiritual zeal that would eventually play a significant part in Obama’s election came not from Washington or Chicago but from Hollywood. Our moviemakers are adept at measuring the zeitgeist of the nation—of its liberal half, anyway—and are a powerful force in shaping it. And for more than a decade, they’ve been churning out what critics call “black-angel” movies. These films feature a white protagonist guided to enlightenment by a black character, usually of divine or supernatural origin or, at the very least, in touch with spiritual experiences that the main character lacks. With the black angel’s help, the white hero finds salvation.

The genre includes, to name just a few, The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000), in which Will Smith—playing a caddie who is really, the film hints, God—restores Matt Damon’s golf game and love life; Bruce Almighty (2003), in which Morgan Freeman, as God, bestows his powers on a manic Jim Carrey; and the awful What Dreams May Come (1998), in which Cuba Gooding, Jr. is a wise soul guiding Robin Williams through the afterlife. These movies have been numerous enough, David Sterritt points out in the Christian Science Monitor, to confuse TV’s buffoonish Homer Simpson: in one episode, “Homer mistook a black man in a white suit for an angelic visitor, all because (according to his embarrassed wife) he’d been seeing too many movies lately.”

Far and away the best of the black-angel films is Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile (1999), based on a novel by Stephen King, whose knack for setting his finger on the cultural pulse has made him a multimillionaire. The basso profundo Michael Clarke Duncan plays John Coffey (note the initials), a gigantic black man wrongfully convicted of the rape and murder of two little girls in Depression-era Louisiana and sentenced to death; Tom Hanks plays Paul Edgecomb, a prison guard who discovers that Coffey is not only innocent but also a Christlike miracle worker. Coffey’s laying-on of hands restores a dead mouse to life, cures Edgecomb of a bladder infection, and heals the warden’s wife’s brain cancer. Shortly before he is executed—the jeering of the girls’ anguished parents and the weeping of the prison guards who know the truth recall the account of the Crucifixion in Luke—Coffey has this exchange with a tortured Edgecomb:

Edgecomb. Tell me what you want me to do. You want me to take you out of here? Just let you run away? See how far you could get?

Coffey. Why would you do such a foolish thing?

Edgecomb. On the day of my judgment, when I stand before God, and He asks me why did I—did I kill one of His true miracles—what am I going to say? That it was my job? . . .

Coffey. You tell God the Father it was a kindness you done. . . . I want it to be over and done with. I do. . . . I’m tired of people being ugly to each other. I’m tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world every day.

The writer or director of a black-angel film recognizes the unspeakable injustices once perpetrated by his country on black people; he wants to be forgiven the sins of his fathers. If he is simply a comedian, he makes Bruce Almighty, casting a black man as God in a sort of lighthearted flattery. If his waters run deeper, he understands that no plum role can atone for the crimes that weigh on him. Instinctively, he realizes what thinkers from Aristotle to Marcel Mauss have known: that whenever a gift is given, the prestige of the giver increases and that of the recipient declines. So he tells a story in which a black man gives the greatest gift of all, suffering—like Jesus in Christian theology—for others’ sins, in fact demanding to suffer, and by demanding, forgiving. White America is pardoned its wrongs, while black America, by pardoning, is elevated to godhood.
 
Are these movies ultimately condescending to blacks? After all, the white protagonist, the person who will be saved or damned according to his decisions, is invariably more interesting than the serene black angel hovering nearby. Indeed, the condescension, if such it is, is a cinematic version of affirmative action—a denial to blacks of Everyman’s struggle for salvation; a magnanimous extension to them of paradise.