Reflection 11/3-11/9

“A New Day” by GRiZ

There’s this AI program I learned about that’s used by US hospitals that has been systematically discriminating against black people by being less likely to refer black patients to programs for people with complex medical needs than white people who are equally as sick. The reason behind this is that the program equates the amount of money spent on healthcare to be an indicator of how sick a person is. At the surface level, this makes sense; if you are sick, you are going to spend money trying to get better. But, Inayatullah would absolutely destroy that analysis, and for good reason. The New York Times reports that for every $100 of wealth in a white family, black families hold just $5.04—WHICH IS ABSOLUTELY CRAZY. So, how can anyone expect black families to allocate their income the same way as other families? Now, the reason for this inequality is not because African Americans aren’t working as hard as white people, but because white people’s ancestors used to own African Americans’ ancestors. Thus, the starting point for African Americans is much lower than the starting point for white people because inter-generational wealth-building or knowledge-building could have never occurred. 

Along these lines, one of the arguments made in class during the Inayatullah discussion was that there are certain countries that are destined to fail because of some internal wrong that can never be fixed. By extension, the international world order should stop spending resources on that country because it would essentially be seen as a waste. The country given as an example was Syria. Now, I am not an expert, by any means, on Syria, but the civil war has most definitely transformed into a proxy war for international actors. The war is no longer only about creating a more democratic Syrian government, but about Turkey suppressing Kurdish separatist ideology, countries and their decisions about asylum policies for Syrian refugees, Russia increasing its influence over the Middle East and maintaining its Mediterranean port, Iran combating the influence of Saudi Arabia over the region, and the US... well, oof. The situation is far more complicated than calling Syria innately wrong.

Both on the macro and mirco scale, the past history of an actor matters when making judgements. Nothing is neutral. By acting like events are created independent of situations ignores both the achievements and failures of actors which creates misrepresentations.


https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03228-6
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/18/upshot/black-white-wealth-gap-perceptions.html