Check Your [White] Privilege

What does that mean? Starting at the beginning, if you Giggle "definition of check" you are confronted with the first two definitions of the verb form:

1. examine (something) in order to determine its accuracy, quality, or condition, or to detect the presence of something.
2. stop or slow down the progress of (something undesirable).

Which to pick? Well if you're in a conversation and someone tells you to "Check your privilege" you are being told to shut up. Hard stop. You are also being told that your privilege is trumped by their entitlement.

So let's not use that definition. Instead let's go with the first and do some examination.

Back to Giggle and "definition of privilege" yields a good working definition of the noun form: "a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group."

Now in the context of the current pandemic let's examine white privilege.

Much has been made of the higher death rate among African Americans and Hispanics who contract COVID-19 with some reasonable conversations regarding co-morbidities. This quickly became politicized with the anticipation of monetization obscuring any real issue by drowning intelligent conversation in a sea of noise and passion.

As it turns out there is a very real issue and it is confirmed by no less an authority than the UK's Public Health England the National Institutes of Health.

Research conducted in the UK during the ongoing pandemic indicates that people of color have at least a 10% higher risk of death from COVID-19, many sub-groups  at least 50% higher and some as high as twice as likely to die than white Britons. These results include an accounting for the effect of sex, age, deprivation and region, leaving ethnicity as the remaining factor. More surprising is the fact that mortality in previous years was quite the opposite with white Britons suffering a higher death rate than people of color from corona virus illnesses.

Turning stateside you'll find a growing wealth of information from the NIH, with two areas of particular interest:

1. research papers (here and here and here) indicate a negative correlation between levels of Vitamin D and COVID-19 severity and death.
   
2. The NIH has long reported (here and here) a negative correlation between melanin levels and Vitamin D synthesis.   

So there you have it. When it comes to COVID-19 the notion of white privilege checks out.

What to do with this info? Some folks might want to panic-buy some Vitamin D, maybe get some sun, but please, for the health of everyone Check Your Ego.