Who's Actually Dying of Systemic Racism?
The numbers behind the case for slavery reparations tell an unexpected story about race
When California’s reparations task force released its report recommending $1.2 million in total lifetime payments to every black person, it made headlines around the world.
California was not a slave state so what was the $1.2 million payout even based on? Even though the task force conveniently proposed limiting payments to the descendants of slaves (despite the lack of slaves in the state) it was mostly based on calculating the differences in life expectancy between black people and white people.
The meat of the 1,000 page report is in the claim that “the difference in life expectancy between African Americans and white non-Hispanics in California can be interpreted as the cumulative effect of unequal treatment”. The report gets the amount of money from multiplying the value of a year of life, $127,226, by the 7.6 difference between the life expectancy of 71 years for black people and 78.6 years for white people to get $966,918 for most of the $1.2 million total.
There are any number of problems with this, but to start with the report has two different black life expectancy numbers. The reparations formula is based on a black life expectancy of 71. The opening of the report however states that “in 2021, the life expectancy of an average African American Californian was 75.1 years” while the reparations formula section describes “an African American Californian at the average life expectancy of 71 years of age”. Which is it?
Black life expectancy in California fell from 74.8 to 71 between 2019 and 2021 by some metrics, but the report uses two different numbers to show just how unreliable and selective it is.
Something else also changed during the pandemic. In 2019, Latinos had a longer life expectancy than white people. That number fell during the pandemic so that white people are now slightly ahead. Asians however are still in first place and far ahead of any other race.
The reparations task force was aware of these numbers, that’s why the report specifies “white non-Hispanics” and refuses to include any broader life expectancy context for other races .
In 2019, white people were in 3rd place in life expectancy behind Latinos and Asians, but ahead of blacks.
Those numbers not only demolish the case for racial reparations based on life expectancy, but the entire underlying premise that lower life expectancy is evidence of systemic racism.
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