It is laughable the lengths that some on the Left will go to “prove” that their Marxist-rooted DEI ideology is “science.”

The latest example comes via a study published in JAMA Network Open, a popular medical journal. Titled “Cumulative Lifespan Stress, Inflammation, and Racial Disparities in Mortality Between Black and White Adults,” the study found that the black participants in the study had a shorter average lifespan than the white participants. They concluded that this disparity was due primarily to higher sustained levels of stress and inflammation among the black participants versus the white participants.

The researchers suggested that the sustained levels of stress among the black participants were due to repeated experiences that triggered the body’s fight-or-flight system. They noted that two proteins tended to linger in the blood longer following these experiences, which accumulate over time, resulting in inflammation, a condition they termed the “weathering hypothesis.”

To put it in a nutshell, the study found that blacks have shorter lifespans on average than whites due to higher sustained levels of stress, which is known to lead to a host of negative health impacts on the body.

The data above is interesting but neither surprising nor controversial. We already know that sustained high stress is not good.

The researchers’ conclusion is where the study moves from sound scientific research into ideological wokeland. As the authors conclude:

In this cohort study of St Louis adults, heightened cumulative lifespan stress and elevated inflammation were associated with shorter survival among Black participants, suggesting these pathways may represent plausible mechanisms mediating racial disparities in mortality among Black and White US individuals. The findings underscore the need for policies that address structural racism, alongside treatments that reduce inflammation and limit stress exposure to reduce mortality disparities.

In other words, black Americans live shorter lives than white Americans because of “racism.” Really?

What is interesting and revealing about the study and the authors’ conclusion is the lack of actual demonstrable evidence linking the data of higher rates of stress with the attributed cause of racism. In short, the conclusion amounts to a classic instance of the error of correlation being smuggled in as causation.

If it is indeed true that black Americans, on average, suffer from higher rates of sustained stress than white Americans, there would appear to be much more logical and obvious reasons for this than some ill-defined, unidentified racism bogeyman.

It has long been known that the rate of violent crime afflicting the black community is significantly higher than in other communities across the country. As data has repeatedly shown, the greatest threat to the lives of black men is other black men. Living amongst this high crime and the fear of suddenly being shot must have a negative impact on a person’s stress levels, much more so than the all-too-often perceived (rather than actual) instances of racism and discrimination.

The Washington Post, in reporting on this story, conflates “health equity” with actual healthcare. As the article states, “Health equity experts said the paper is unlikely to influence policy, in part because it does not pinpoint specific forms of structural racism — such as redlining, police violence, income inequality, school segregation or historical racial terror such as lynching and cross-burning — that drive health disparities.”

This study aims to strengthen the legitimacy of DEI as an informative ideology for scientific inquiry. “Health equity” aims to promote the ideology of DEI, not actual healthcare.

A better conclusion from this study would be to consider the cultural elements that may be fueling the higher rates of violence and poverty within these black communities, versus those of the white communities or Asian American communities, since they, on average, enjoy the longest average life spans in the U.S.