There is a 30-year gap in the life expectancies of Black and white Chicagoans depending on their ZIP code. On average, residents of the Streeterville neighborhood, which is 73% white, live to be 90 years old. Nine miles south, the residents of Englewood, which is nearly 95% Black, have a life expectancy of 60.

Journalist Linda Villarosa says the disparity in life expectancies has its roots in government-sanctioned policies that systematically extracted wealth from Black neighborhoods — and eroded the health of generations of people. She writes about her family’s own story in The New York Times Magazine article “Black Lives Are Shorter in Chicago. My Family’s History Shows Why.”
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“These neighborhoods lack resources. They lack grocery stores. They lack healthy outdoor space. They often lack clean air and clean water and clean land,” she says. “If you live in a place like that — that has few resources but also worse conditions — your health suffers.”

Source: NPR.org

There are people who rightfully mock the sort of woo that leads people sunburn their taints in the name of greater energy or who refuse to vaccinate their children because of autism or the “Mark of the Beast”.

“Haw haw! Can’t believe they’re praying instead of going to the doctor. Sky daddy cultists.”

But in the United States, one of the most appealing aspects of many different kinds of woo, from essential oils to being “lifted up in prayer, is that “alternative medicine” is considerably less expensive than getting “Western medicine”.

If you believe you need medicine to live, or worse your child does, but you know you can’t afford it, that’s a really tough idea to sit with for very long. Thus, cheap miracles are much more attractive purely due to their accessibility. It doesn’t justify these choices, but it does make them explicable beyond “omg how stoopid??”

If we’re rationalists and we understand that what all of these folk need is the right medication and science-based medical services, how can any rationalist, evidence-based, “i fucking LOVE science!” person be satisfied with a system that kills people based on their wealth?

If we can say, “I follow where the evidence takes me,” how can anyone support capitalism where to be a Black American is to have decades of life and health stolen from you?

Insulin is not a new technology, but it costs 10 times as much in the USA as the rest of the world. The effective eugenics of charging these prices is not just a death sentence but a long, excruciating death sentence for people who need it. These people also happen to disproportionately be people whose lives were surrounded by the sorts of food and lack of medical resources that would lead them to develop type II diabetes in the first place.

If you’re a rationalist and you think this system is fair or even the best of all possible worlds, dig a little deeper and ask yourself why you’re OK with the injustice being this sort of injustice, exactly.

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Original tweet:

https://twitter.com/Kidfears99/status/1303378799153872898

A new-gen Xbox console will be priced LOWER THAN a vial of insulin that keeps me alive for a week. $299 v. $324. Imagine having to buy an Xbox every week for the rest of your life, just to survive. This is my America. https://t.co/Vwv4FCemG5

— Laura Marston (@Kidfears99) September 8, 2020