If you thought Critical Race critiques of mathematics as a tool of white supremacy were bad, just wait until you read what’s happening in the medical ethics field.
In a prior post, we reported on the first two parts in an investigation by John Murawski at Real Clear Investigations, Investigation: Medical Education And Research Crumbling Under Racial Identity Politics.
You can read Murkowski’s reports here:
Murkowski recently released his third and in some ways most troubling report in the series, Doctors’ Dilemma: Replacing Colorblindness to Favor Minority Care (Part 3):
Doctors are questioning the concept of colorblindness in patient care as a racist holdover that benefits white people. And some openly acknowledge that prioritizing non-whites for medical care to compensate for historical wrongs may result in a greater loss of life. But increasingly they say that society must take this route as a matter of medical ethics.The colorblind standard, which says that race is an irrelevant consideration in providing medical treatment, has come under intense scrutiny during the COVID-19 pandemic, which disproportionately sickened and killed people of color.Numerous academic papers reassessed the moral logic of triage, which sets policy on prioritizing emergency care, as coronavirus deaths surged and medical ethicists grappled with the moral tradeoffs of allocating scarce resources….
Murkowski meticulously goes through the recent medical literature that led to his conclusions quoted above. You should read the whole thing, including a papers by prestigious medical ethicists which Murkowski summarizes as follows:
Thus saving as many lives as possible in a colorblind manner becomes a classic example of systemic racism: a neutral standard that benefits white people. That’s because people of color, with lower life expectancies, are more likely to be downgraded in priority for emergency lifesaving measures.“In our view, when society is substantially responsible for creating disparities through unfair social policies, there is a special obligation to prioritize disparity mitigation,” they wrote, “even if doing so results in somewhat fewer overall lives saved compared with purely utilitarian triage.”
What is the ideology driving the push for race-based triage. You may have heard of it, Critical Race Theory:
Coinciding with the rise of Black Lives Matter and nationwide protests over the killing of George Floyd, the pandemic’s unequal death rates jolted medical ethicists to rethink how doctors and hospitals should prioritize the distribution of ventilators, intensive care beds and coronavirus vaccines.The reevaluation of racially neutral standards as inherently discriminatory could ultimately expand to other areas of medicine as medical ethicists adopt critical race theory and assess the allocation of medical care through the prism of “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “implicit bias.”“To achieve equitable access and distribution of care, critical race theory must be a part of the process utilized to create broad, population-focused guidelines,” four doctors wrote in a Health Affairs article last year.
Murkowski goes through a litany of news reports and other medical writings and concludes:
One of the authors, Michelle Morse, is the chief medical officer of the New York City Health Department. The other author, Bram Wispelwey, is a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and also co-founder and chief strategist of Health for Palestine.“The stubborn persistence of racial inequities – both in health care and across society at large – gives the lie to the effectiveness of colorblind policies,” they wrote.They acknowledge that offering preferential care based on race may prompt legal challenges, but they say there is ample evidence that the current societal systems “already unfairly preference people who are white.” They further note: “Our approach is corrective and therefore mandated.”
It’s not clear the extent to which race-based triage and treatment actually has taken hold. It would present a medical malpractice legal risk of almost infinite proportions. But as we’ve seen elsewhere in society, once a CRT worldview takes hold in an institution, what once seemed insane becomes commonplace.
So depending on the melanin in your skin, the doctor may or may not see you now.
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