The sample size, by necessity, is tiny. To be clear, of those 145 individuals, only some died from the plague. Of those who did, the researchers find that 18% were black! Nearly a fifth! Given that the black population of London would have been quite a lot less than 1%, that’s some incredible ratio. If you’re a scientist and you get a result like that, you should be asking serious questions about your methodology.
Oh I nearly forgot, they’re drawing these weighty conclusions from an even smaller sample – from the bones they claim to have identified as belonging to black women. The plague killed men at a higher rate than women, by the way. Implausibility piles on implausibility. This is before we even get into whether the category of “black” is remotely meaningful here, or exactly how they think the mechanism of “structural racism” worked, which would require actual historical knowledge.
In short: either there was some utterly wild disparity in the way different races were hit by the bubonic plague in London – or maybe the researchers aren’t identifying what they think they’re identifying. I rather suspect the latter.
One of the researchers is Rebecca Redfern, senior curator of Archaeology at the Museum of London. She’s behind several stories in the media over recent years that claim to find Britain was more diverse that previously thought. In this study she uses the measurement of skulls to identify racial heritage, a method whose scientific credibility is deeply questionable, to put it mildly. It’s funny that while some academics claim to have debunked the notion that race has any firm biological basis at all, for others, nineteenth-century-style racial craniometry is still a going concern.