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Your perspective doesn't lead to the discovery of the true causal link for sickle cell anemia, though.

It's what leads to us pretending there can't be any unpalatable differences between ethnic groups, clutching to presumptions about maybe the health care system being too racist, and avoiding looking deeper into it because we think we've already decided what the answer is (racism). Meanwhile real people are suffering because they aren't getting treated as effectively as they could.

We don't know what we don't know, so it's impossible to tell how many people are suffering or for what reasons.




We know what racism begets. We've seen the way that it has been used to warp inquiry, ethical guidelines, and clinical outcomes, often unintentionally and through processes that diffuse blame to below the level of individual bigotry. It would be nice if we lived in a world without a track record of pursuing the ramifications of assumed "unpalatable differences," such that what you're suggesting would be sound, but we don't. We, at this moment, are trying to climb out of a hole of ignorance - in medicine, in social science, in economics, in much of the quantifiable and model-able world - dug by presumptions of "unpalatable differences."

So, I say again, the the priorities, as you've described them, are out of wack. We are much more at risk of jumping to damaging conclusions than we are of missing helpful breakthroughs. Our vigilance should be tuned in regard to this.




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