It’s really hard for me not to be skeptical of a study that starts with the premise of measuring everyone else against “the most privileged group,” aka. white men, and then calling their metric “health justice.”

I don’t know the stats off the top of my head but I’ve heard many times that men’s health issues are under-studies relative to women’s — ie breast cancer versus prostate cancer. I’ve also seen that mental health problems affect men more than women, as well as behavioral problems with youth, and yet there’s no outcry for “health justice” for all the men with mental issues or men vastly overrepresented in the prison population.

The study claims that health correlates most strongly with income, and that the gap between black and white has narrowed - and yet the study author claims there’s a “stunning lack of progress.”

Most of America’s problems correlate most strongly with income and more weakly with race and gender, which isn’t surprising when income itself is uneven between race and gender demographics.

Yet it feels to me like we’re constantly crying out about race and gender discrimination while paying much less attention to wealth and income which seem to be the root issue.

Are there racists in the country? Do hate crimes happen? Yes, and we shouldn’t gloss over them.

But are the country’s problems driven mostly by racial hatred? I don’t think so. I think the problem is we have done a lot to pull the ladder up behind the upper-middle class, everyone in the lower income brackets is getting screwed, and that disproportionately affects minorities and historically disadvantaged groups. I think if we could get more serious about putting the ladder back and investing in upward mobility for all, we could make a lot more progress on all the rest of the issues that are affecting the country.