Using Race in Medicine Isn’t Woke

On Tuesday, the Government pledged £18 million of additional funding for an ongoing prostate cancer trial, which will enable all black men in Britain to take part. However, when Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy announced the news on X, his post was met with a torrent of negative replies. “Two-tier NHS,” wrote one commenter. “More anti-white racism,” said another. “What about white men?” asked a third.

At best, Lammy’s announcement was seen as tone deaf, coming on the same day as the Henry Nowak bodycam footage — which revealed that police had arrested Nowak as he lay dying, after false accusations of ‘racism’ by the man who’d just stabbed him. At worst, it was seen as yet another case of special treatment for ethnic minorities, an ill-advised attempt to correct some “historic injustice”.

Such reactions are hardly surprising. Lammy has been a vocal supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, denouncing its critics for their “real ignorance”. He has accused Oxford University of “social apartheid” for admitting too few black students. And he has called for slavery reparations, once stating in the first-person plural that “as Caribbean people, we are not going to forget our history”. (Lammy subsequently claimed, incoherently, that reparations are “not about the transfer of cash”.)

However, screening more black men for prostate cancer isn’t woke pandering. It’s good science. Men with African genetic ancestry are more susceptible to the disease, and it makes sense to prioritise high-risk groups for medical studies. (For obvious reasons, no women of any race are included in the trial.)

Research shows that individuals who carry African ancestry in regions of the genome linked to prostate cancer have a higher risk of developing the disease. And many variants believed to play a causal role are more common in African populations, with some being rare or absent in other populations. In other words, black men’s greater susceptibility to prostate cancer is at least partly genetic.

The Government’s own “equality impact assessment” for prostate cancer screening actually acknowledges this, albeit with the usual hedging. “Black men,” the document notes, “describes a socially defined and genetically heterogeneous group whose risk is influenced by both ancestry and social determinants of health”.

The irony is that Left-wing academics keep insisting that racial categories like ‘black’ and ‘white’ are purely ‘social constructs’, which only capture ‘superficial’ traits like skin colour. Yet here we find they are sufficiently useful to determine people’s eligibility for a cancer trial. Has the Government inadvertently lent credence to claims of biological race differences? It certainly seems so.

Of course, the principle must be applied consistently. If diseases that affect black people at higher rates are to receive additional funding, then so should diseases that affect white people at higher rates, such as multiple sclerosis.

The point is that there’s nothing wrong in principle with prioritising one racial group for a medical study if it’s based on sound evidence of greater susceptibility. Indeed, medical research should take all relevant information into account, including people’s ethnic background.