In August, Dave Weigel reported Mary Frances Berry's assessment that the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights had become "a useless right-wing political cabal," less concerned with civil rights than with GOP talking points. Berry had served two terms as chair of the CCR, so her statement was alarming.
In the intervening months, we've seen just how accurate her impression was. Even as state governments and groups like the NAACP are suing banks for targeting blacks and Hispanics for predatory loans regardless of credit, the CCR has taken aim at laws outlawing redlining, questioning whether "federal efforts to increase home-ownership among minority and low-income individuals may have unintentionally weakened underwriting standards and lending policies." These poor banks weren't trying to make money by making risky loans then securitizing the risk -- they were forced to lend to people of color by the mean ol' government. This assessment neatly traces right-wing talking points on the mortgage crisis but bears no resemblance to an objective assessment of what actually happened.
Yesterday Harold Pollack took on the CCR's latest antics. In a report on the pending health-care legislation, the CCR bravely comes out against more minority doctors. As Pollack explains though, the focus on whether or not outright discrimination is responsible for disparate health-care outcomes is a strawman that allows the CCR to focus on attacking affirmative action rather than addressing the issue of racial health disparities.
As Chandra puts it: "Forty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, minority health care is de facto separate and unequal." Hospitals that mainly serve African-Americans have markedly higher adjusted mortality rates than are found in hospitals that mainly serve non-Hispanic whites. Hospitals that predominantly serve African-Americans are also less likely to provide key evidence-supported interventions.
USCCR conflates this valid point with a very different argument against “racial preferences” that mainly knocks down caricatured arguments no sensible affirmative action supporter actually accepts. Thus, USCCR criticizes the “notion that simply increasing the numbers of black doctors is the solution to the problem of inferior treatment for minorities.”
The fact is that if you're black or Hispanic, there are a number of economic and residential factors related to the ongoing legacy of legalized racial discrimination that affect your access to quality care, factors the government has done little to address and does little to address in this health care bill. "Racist" doctors are not the primary issue -- but the health disparities are real, glaring, and they are a matter of life and death.
The CCR however, would rather whine about affirmative action instead of health disparities, voter fraud instead of voter disenfranchisement, and the Community Reinvestment Act instead of predatory loans. It seems Berry's assessment couldn't be more correct.
-- A. Serwer
