Investigation: Medical Education And Research Crumbling Under Racial Identity Politics

Investigation: Medical Education And Research Crumbling Under Racial Identity Politics

We have covered many times how medical schools are not being spared the meritocracy purge in the name of racial identity politics.

We have focused on SUNY-Upstate Medical University, where we had to go to court to get them to turn over documents about their racial identity programming. That battle will continue because though the court ordered documents produced, the production we received is absurdly heavily redacted. For *some* reason, the administrators at SUNY-Upstate Medical University really don’t want the public to see what they are doing and how they got there.

It’s not just at SUNY-Upstate Medical. Critical Race activism is deeply embedded now throughout medical schools.

Activist Ibram Kendi was invited to speak by the Boston University School of Public Health on injecting his “antiracism” agenda into medical care. (Featured Image)

John Murawski at Real Clear Investigations has a two-part series on how Medicine Is Getting Major Injections of Woke Ideology (Part 1) and As Race ‘Equity’ Advances in Health Care, Signs of a Chilling Effect on Dissent (Part 2).

From Part 1:

The national racial reckoning over reparations and critical race theory is taking over the world of medicine and health care. Prestigious medical journals, top medical schools and elite medical centers are adopting the language of social justice activism and vowing to confront “systemic racism,” dismantle “structural violence” and disrupt “white supremacy” in their institutional cultures….

Rare is the doctor who is willing to publicly question claims of white privilege and implicit bias in the healthcare system, and already several doctors who have publicly pushed back have been demoted and have filed legal actions alleging retaliation. This year the medical profession received an unequivocal message when two editors of the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association resigned under pressure over a podcast that aired opinions expressing skepticism that the United States is plagued by systemic racism….

The movement is just beginning reshape the practice of medicine, but a primary assumption is that white doctors and institutions are pervaded with unconscious bias, and that black doctors, who are significantly underrepresented in the profession, would provide better care to black patients. But because black students typically get lower scores and lower grades, increasing the ranks of African American and other minority practitioners would likely require moving away from a reliance on conventional measures of academic qualification, such as undergraduate grades and standardized test scores.

Medical education is particularly politicized:

Medical schools are adding units on critical race theory, intersectionality, implicit bias, identity, oppression, allyship, power and privilege to their curricula. Medical students are learning about medical exploitation and medical experimentation on enslaved blacks, black prisoners and other unwitting subjects. And staple reading assignments in med schools feature such non-medical polemics as Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” and Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist.”

This year alone, six state medical boards have added a requirement for training in “antiracism,” implicit bias or cultural competency for doctors in some practice areas to be eligible for a medical license, raising the total to 13 jurisdictions that require such training; eight other board are reviewing such proposals, according to the Federation of State Medical Boards.

I was interviewed at length by Murawski, and he quoted me in Part 1:

“It’s a very ideological approach to things: ‘People are going to die, so you have to agree with everything I say. And if you disagree with it, you want people to die apparently,’ ” said William Jacobson, clinical professor of law at Cornell Law School and president of the Legal Insurrection Foundation, which runs the conservative websites legalinsurrection.com and criticalrace.org.

“And it also is extremely lucrative for consultants and administrators who have a vested interested in perpetuating the problem and these efforts,” said Jacobson, who is involved in litigation against SUNY Upstate Medical University for internal communications related to the school’s planned equity strategy.

***

But the critics say that applying critical race theory to medicine too often devolves into an exercise in conformational bias that seeks only the evidence that confirms the theory of systemic racism, ignores or disallows contradictory evidence, and imposes forced interpretations on complex data.

“They start with the conclusion. And there can be no deviation from the conclusion,” said Jacobson, the conservative law professor at Cornell. “You cannot question the conclusion because the conclusion of systemic racism is the starting point. It stifles dissenting views. It stifles open inquiry.”

Part 2 of the investigation focuses on the silencing of dissenting voices:

The national movement to eradicate what activists call systemic racism and white privilege from medicine and health care has few public critics in the medical profession. A possible reason: Skeptics who have questioned these efforts have been subject to harsh Twitter campaigns, professional demotions and other blowback….

Such incidents are noteworthy because of their eerily scripted language of moral outrage and public denunciation, coming from the nation’s highest levels of professional achievement, often on internal issues that would typically be handled with sensitivity and discretion as personnel matters….

Those who are concerned by the social justice fervor sweeping through the medical profession say that such examples are evidence of the movement’s chilling effect on open debate of complex social issues.

The destruction of so many institutions at such a swift pace is staggering. Welcome to the future of racialized and politicized medicine, where it’s inevitable that the medical profession will end up in the service of politics, like Big Tech already is.

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