Bacon's Rebellion

by James A. Bacon

The editorial board of The Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press is committed to the proposition that the United States is afflicted by “systemic inequalities” between the races. The publication’s analysis is more nuanced, however, than much of what we read and hear. Opining on the role of credit scores in building wealth in America, the Pilot wrote in a column yesterday, “Race plays a role, but is not in itself the determining factor.”

It’s refreshing to see the Pilot’s pundits not using racism as the universal explanation for all social ills besetting minorities today. But they still have a bit to learn.

African Americans have lower credit scores on average than the general population, the Pilot notes, drawing from research conducted by The Washington Post. The reason isn’t overt racism or even bias in the credit-reporting systems, it appears, but the fact that credit scores are lower in Southern states… and the African-American population is concentrated in the South. Why are credit scores lower in the South? Because of medical debt. Says the Pilot: “The South has a lot more unpaid medical bills than other regions.”

Unpaid medical bills may not sound like institutional racism, but the Pilot’s pontificators imply that it really is.

For starters the South has more than our share of unhealthy people. Much of that poor health is a result of systemic inequalities that lead to poverty and related problems such as food “deserts” where inner-city people have limited access to healthy foods.

Plus, the South was slower to expand Medicaid than other regions of the country.

Thus, in the worldview of the Pilot’s editorial writers, the chain of causality runs like this: (1) Racism created food deserts; (2) which made people overweight; (3) which put more people in the hospital; (4) which resulted in bigger medical bills; which people could not always repay until Medicaid came along; (5) which hurt credit scores; (6) which contributed to a wealth gap. (more…)