I'll Take My Reparations in Tablet Form

In May, we took our son to the hospital because he’d been having a fever for about 5 days, and it was right when all the swine flu hoopla was swirling around. On top of that he had just started day care a week earlier. So just to be sure, we took him to the E.R. Big mistake. But that’s another post.

As a result of the E.R. visit my son was diagnosed with a Vitamin-D deficiency. I’m not really a biology guy, so I figured we just needed to make some changes to his diet. (I’m already a stickler for diet so any kind of vitamin deficiency is still shocking to me) We talked to his pediatrician, and he shrugged it off. Said something about most African Americans suffering from some form of mild vitamin-D deficiency simply as a result of the melanin in our skin being excellent at protecting us from the harmful rays of the sun, but hampering the conversion of sunlight to vitamin-D. But because his diagnosis worried us we got a referral to an endocrinologist. And that’s where it gets interesting.

We’re sitting in his office and he’s going over “blah, blah, sunlight, blah, blah, blah, black people, blah, blah, standards to low.” So now my interest is piqued right? Why didn’t our pediatrician recommend a Vitamin D supplement in the first place? There’s all kinds of info out there about SIDS, and flu and fevers, but nothing about Vitamin D. In his defense, how do you tell a parent that you need a certain medication because you are black. And since there really is no definitive answer, and in infants the liquid form of the vitamin D is expensive, I’m sure most parents would do a cost/benefit analysis and determine that $300 a month isn’t necessary for something with no proven and generally accepted benefit.

The other thing about this Vitamin D deficiency is that it is more prevalent in breast-fed babies. Infant formulas, milk etc., are all fortified with Vitamin D, but still for some black people that isn’t enough. So then I started thinking about the current health care debate.

So far we’ve been talking about the Health Care Debate in terms of who pays, government control, effects on insurers, the economy etc. That isn’t really the half of the health debate. Part of the reason this is on my mind is because of another post on the Insanity Report. But we don’t even have to go as far as end of life care. Let’s take something as simple as Vitamin D.

Humans get the majority of their daily vitamin D from sunlight. Melanin, found in higher amounts in blacks protected our skin from the UVA/B in those equatorial regions, however this also has the side effect of slowing the production of Vitamin D in our skin. So blacks living further from the equator need much more exposure to the sun in order to produce the Vitamin D they need. Apparently, vitamin D (like pretty much all vitamins) is a superstar in fighting high blood pressure, obesity, certain cancers, depression and diabetes. Coincidentally, these all have very high prevalence in the black community. Pause. Cholesterol. Vitamin D. Black People. Sunlight. Now, health standards require a minimum amount of vitamin d far below what some biologists recommend. And these recommendations come in diet (Vitamin D2) not Vitamin D3 which is more similar to what your bodies produces naturally. So basically it boils down to a different recommended level of vitamin D for black people than white people, because darker pigmentation causes vitamin d to be created in the body more slowly.

So, what happens in a single payer system? How would white people feel about paying (in taxes) for additional treatments for vitamin D deficiency in black people? $300 a month per black infant living above, say, Miami, for the first 3 years of life. (Assuming that after this period other forms of over-the-counter vitamins, more exposure to natural sunlight, can take its place) And this is generous (to the tax payer, some doctors recommend Vitamin D supplements (in much lower doses) to everyone. Naturally black people would still need more. And this is, admittedly a trivial example. I choose this example because, the data I’ve seen doesn’t suggest any other factors contributing to the vitamin d deficiency. It is strictly skin color. And research suggests that getting an adequate amount of vitamin D is nearly impossible by food sources alone. Unlike other diseases that affect one race over another where there may be contributing factors such as weight, diet etc.

Adding to the complexity of this issue is the reason why black people are more affected by this than others. That is inhabiting areas far from the equator, namely, the Atlantic Slave Trade. Isn’t that fantastic?

{Resurrected} Happy Father's Day! Here's your cookie!

Ok.... so I started this blog awhile ago but I never really knew what I wanted to write about. So I wrote about 12 posts, published maybe 3 or 4 and then got "de-motivated" and stopped for awhile. Then I finally got some inspiration (from my muse) and decided to focus my blog and create more posts.

The inspiration came from a conversation about fatherhood, overheard on WEAA this past Sunday. The perfect opportunity to resurrect this old, unpublished post! The show was about Being Black in Baltimore, a continuation of CNN's Black in America program. The host was moderating a discussion on what was wrong with Baltimore specifically and one of the callers was going on and on about how Black men just don't get enough credit for being good dad's, taking care of their kids etc.

....... feeling a pang in my stomach........

He goes on to say that "we" should make more of concerted effort to praise those black men who are taking care of their responsibilities. I suppose the logic is something like this: "Black fathers are stigmatized as not taking care of their children, producing multiple illegitimate kids by multiple "baby-momma's" and then shirking their responsibilities to those kids, forcing the mother to pick up the slack. I'm not about to say that these situations don't exists. In fact I know they do. Although brothers like this bruh here don't agree. He says that he doesn't really know any dead-beat dads. Which raises sort of a valid point. Because even the dudes I know who don't take care of their kids are relatively few. But I do know a good number and one kid raised without one or both parents is too much, especially in instances where this can be avoided. But I don't think that means that we should be celebrating every black man who does what he's supposed to do.

It's crazy. We don't celebrate the mother's for feeding and clothing their babies. Why would we? That's what mothers do. In fact we find psychological explanations for mothers who DON'T take care of their own children. All those stereotypical qualities of motherhood that exist, we don't call out a special day for all those non-dead beat black mothers. Because it is the natural order of things. Likewise is fatherhood. It's not abnormal. And I don't want accolades for doing what I'm supposed to do. I'm exceptional for a number of reasons, and handling my own business isn't one of my exceptional qualities. This lady in the (mall/street/church), was so excited to note how I was such a "good" black man for taking care of my kids. That's outrageous. Any decent human being takes care of their kids. Point blank. And pretending otherwise is a disservice to the countless men who do take care of their responsibilities, and it creates this notion that it's somehow "extra" to be a father to your children. Like it's somehow going above and beyond the call of duty. I call bull--.

You know what I got for Father's Day, --my first Father's Day mind you? A big ass cookie. How fitting, right?