Barrel Strength

There is a widespread belief that we are living in a more enlightened age than the nineteenth century. Then, the white, the male, and the Christian were thought to be superior, according to the modern interpretation of what they thought in the 19th century. Obviously they thought wrongly in the 19th century. Today, we hold ourselves so much more enlightened, because we believe the white, the male, and the Christian are inferior. Bad. Evil in fact – not that we feel comfortable with so judgmental a word as “evil”. But whiteness is the new blackness, according to the politically correct.

Take for instance the case of the students’ council of Carleton University of Ottawa. It has removed the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Association from the list of charitable organizations it will support with its efforts. Why?

According to them, cystic fibrosis is disproportionately a white male disease. Accordingly, it is not an appropriate concern.

“OTTAWA — The Carleton University Students’ Association has voted to drop a cystic fibrosis charity as the beneficiary of its annual Shinearama fundraiser, supporting a motion that argued the disease is not “inclusive” enough.
Cystic fibrosis “has been recently revealed to only affect white people, and primarily men” said the motion read Monday night to student councillors, who voted almost unanimously in favour of it.”

Is breast cancer inclusive enough? Is sickle cell anemia inclusive enough? Is prostate cancer inclusive enough?

The Carleton Students’ Council is set to reconsider the motion.

Racial, sexual, and religious hierarchies are not eliminated by inverting them.

A factual note

By googling incidence of cystic fibrosis, the following appears quickly.

“In the United States, the incidence of cystic fibrosis is highest in Whites of northern European ancestry (1 in 2,000 live births) and lowest in Blacks (1 in 17,000 live births), Native Americans, and people of Asian ancestry. The disease occurs equally in both sexes.”

Another entry reports that:

“We develop a statistical model for estimating cystic fibrosis (CF) incidence among infants born in the U.S.A. that accounts for under-diagnosis due to death prior to diagnosis and we apply it to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Patient Registry data for the years 1989 to 1991. The resulting estimate of incidence relative to live births among whites is 1:3419 while that among non-whites is 1:12,163. As a by-product of the modelling approach, estimates of the underlying average diagnosis age given survival to diagnosis are 409 years for whites and 455 years for non-whites, but this difference was not statistically significant and appears to demonstrate that diagnosis efforts may be approximately the same for whites and non-whites.”

As a final note, perhaps student council debates might be improved by access to the Internet.