Blaming racism is racism itself, cheapens civil discourse

In the 13th Century the plague was attributed to Jewish malevolence. In the 17th Century odd behavior in Salem, Mass., could lead to the capital charge of witchcraft.

Now, in the 21st Century "racism" is the convenient indictment of whites for any pathology that disproportionately affects blacks. Moreover, truth is not a defense on the notion that the reality of the allegation is solely within the subjective provenance of the accuser to determine. This is eerily reminiscent of the "spectral evidence" that was grounded in dreams and visions and constituted admissible testimony before Pilgrim courts.

Your front page article June 24 titled "Officials: Racism a factor in infant mortality rate" illustrates this condition. Your correspondent blandly reported that at a gathering of "25 heath care professionals ... all participants accepted racism as a contributing factor in that it's an actual physical stressor..."

The constant imputation of sinister racial motives to whites is worse than guilt by association. It is guilt by accusation wrapped in inflammatory language that is not unlike yelling fire in a crowed theater.

While the incidence of black and white infant deaths varies greatly, the local ratios put Kane County at the tippy top of the peer counties infant death pyramid not only for black but white families. Where is the Kane County Health Department? Should the appropriate oversight committee of the County Board be dispatched to those precincts that boast the lowest rates to see what they are doing right? In point of fact would taxpayers and prospective maternal clients have been better served if the county's senior health official, Paul Kuehner, had made this very pilgrimage instead of "brain storming" with 24 professionals?

Incidents of occurrence is only one measure. In Kane County white and Hispanic families bury the same number of babies and do so twice as often as their black neighbors.

The three groups have intersecting claims to misery. But all things being equal closing the "gap" is often a zero sum game with only one winner. Rather than looking just to bring down the black mortality rate why not seek ways to bring down infant deaths for all groups?

These professionals do themselves no credit and their mission no service by demonizing the white community. The indiscriminate use of "racist" that has crept into the vernacular has cheapened civic discourse. The media and profession should seek to elevate the quality of the conversation in the interests of civility and progress.

William H. Regnery

Wayne