Enslaved Women, Crash Test Dummies, and Native American Mortality

Troy Tassier is a professor of economics at Fordham University and the author of The Rich Flee and the Poor Take the Bus: How Our Unequal Society Fails Us during Outbreaks.

About ten days ago a social media post from the podcast “Pod Save America” went viral. The short video contained a portion of a DOGE employee deposition where he described his decision to cancel a previously funded research grant. The research project investigated women’s slave labor during the Holocaust. His reasoning for the cancellation, it was a “gender based story that’s inherently discriminatory to focus on this specific group” and thus it violated Present Trump’s executive order banning the funding of DEI by the federal government. Leave alone why this particular research project might be valuable for a moment.

The video came back to my mind yesterday in two circumstances. In the first I was preparing for my class and re-watching an episode of the PBS video series “The Invisible Shield.” The four episode series traces the development and success of public health over past centuries and compares those experiences to the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the second episode there is a segment that highlights the experience of Native American communities and the devastating impact of Covid-19 on them.

Few know that the rate of mortality among people of Navajo Nation was three times greater than the overall rate of mortality across the United States. Approximately 1% of the Navajo population died from Covid-19. In my book, The Rich Flee and The Poor Take the Bus I discuss this underreported mortality difference along with some of the causes for the difference.

However, this particular segment of the video doesn’t concentrate on the difference itself. Instead, it concentrates on the struggle to simply document the effect of Covid-19 on native people in the US. Some areas don’t track native populations as a particular subset of the population in the same way that they track women or men, or Asian, Black, Latinx, or white people. Native populations were simply missing as part of the Covid-19 data for some geographic areas and unable to be considered as a particular group.

Shortly after watching this video, I settled in to eat my lunch before my class and began glancing through the New York Times app on my phone. A headline in the opinion section caught my eye: “Buckle Up Women, Cars Still Aren’t Built for You.” The piece contained a short video concerning the history of car safety and focused on the fact that standard automobile crash test dummies are constructed to match the basic body type of an average man. Partly as a result, women are 73% more likely to have a severe injury and 17% more likely to die from car crashes. Yet, auto manufacturers continue to fight legislation that would require them to test the safety of their vehicles using crash test dummies based on female anatomy.

If we consider both of these examples, one can imagine that the DOGE employee who relied on President Trump’s DEI ban to block a study of enslaved women during the Holocaust might also block funding for studies of native mortality rates (as a separate group from the overall population) or studies of the effect of the non-use of female crash test dummies. Extending the reasoning of the DOGE employee, both would be “inherently discriminatory” because they “focus” on a “specific group.”

Banning DEI leaves us trying to understand the diverse society that we live in without paying attention to our differences. DEI bans are not just an assault on being “woke.” Blocking DEI programs in such a wide-ranging manner can have life and death consequences. One can imagine how many NIH or NSF grants may have been defunded simply because they investigated only women or posed questions about differences between racial or ethnic groups.

Make America Great Again clearly wants to take us back in time – to a time when white men were seen as the status quo and everyone else was expected to contort to fit within their shadow. Most people today recognize the consequences of this folly. Unfortunately, many of the people in power in our federal government do not; or, even more concerning, they simply don’t care.

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Troy Tassier is a professor of economics at Fordham University and the author of The Rich Flee and the Poor Take the Bus: How Our Unequal Society Fails Us during Outbreaks.