RUTHFULLY YOURS

UCLA’s first-year medical students were required late last month to sit through a two-hour lecture on the subject of “Housing (In)Justice” that was part of a mandatory course on “structural racism” at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. UCLA’s guest lecturer was a left-wing homeless advocate, Lisa Gray-Garcia (pictured above), who told her captive audience of aspiring doctors that modern medicine is “white science.” Her pagan prayers to “Mama Earth,” which were part of Ms. Gray-Garcia’s presentation, included a blessing for “black,” “brown,” and “houseless people” who, she claimed, die because of the “crapatalist lie” of “private property.”

Wearing a Palestinian scarf, Ms. Gray-Garcia, a Hamas sympathizer who once posted on X that “Israel is Amerikkklan,” led UCLA’s medical students in chants of “Free, free Palestine.”

UCLA’s medical school has declared on its website that its fundamental mission is to champion “Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.” In pursuit of achieving “equity,” the website states, “We have a collective commitment to combat structural racism.” Its “anti-racism roadmap” includes developing “an advisory committee to include experts in critical race theory, social justice, bias, and health disparities.”

The school’s reading list includes books by leading critical race theorists. They include Robin DiAngelo’s “White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism” and Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to be an antiracist.”

UCLA is not an outlier. Indoctrination in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (“DEI”) and Critical Race Theory dogmas is being force fed to medical school students and faculty across the country.

The Oregon Health and Science University’s “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism Strategic Action Plan,” for example, requires “ongoing training and learning opportunities related to DEI and anti-racism for learners, staff, faculty and administrative leaders.” There will be “consequences for individuals who are not compliant with the required training,” the strategic action plan warns. This includes incorporating “DEI, anti-racism and social justice core competencies in performance appraisals of faculty and staff.”

Harvard Medical School states as one of its anti-racism initiatives the development of classes to “acknowledge the ways in which racism is embedded in science and scientific culture and work to redress these longstanding issues.” In other words, Harvard Medical School is on board with the outrageous claim that medicine is “white science.”

The Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons’ Anti-Racism Task Force recommended that the school “Create and implement ongoing faculty development on race and racism for teaching faculty by individuals grounded in critical race theory.”

In developing their anti-racist learning objectives, medical schools like Columbia’s College of Physicians & Surgeons are using a framework drafted by the Association of American Medical Colleges (“AAMC”). The Association of American Medical Colleges published a paper in 2022 entitled “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Competencies Across the Learning Continuum.” The “cross-continuum competencies” described in AAMC’s paper are intended to “help educators design or adapt curricula and help educators and learners in their individual professional development and DEI journeys.”

Aspiring doctors entering their medical residencies, for example, should learn about “multiple forms of oppression or privilege related to clinical decisions and practice.” They should learn how to identify “systems of power, privilege, and oppression and their impacts on health outcomes (e.g., White privilege, racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, religious oppression).” For good measure, AAMC added the impacts of “colonization, White supremacy, acculturation” and “assimilation” to what residents need to be concerned about on their way to joining the medical profession.

AAMC’s paper recommends a series of workshops offered by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Center for Antiracism in Practice. One of the workshops “prepares participants to identify the manifestations of racism and White supremacy within their courses” while another workshop “guides participants in describing the impact of racism and White supremacy on learners and their future patients.”  In the third workshop of this series, “participants identify concrete change targets within their courses and begin to develop alternative, anti-racist policies and practices.”

AAMC refers readers of its 2022 paper to the meaning of “equity,” as opposed to “equality,” set forth in a another document entitled “Advancing Health Equity: Guide to Language, Narrative and Concept” prepared by AAMC in association with the American Medical Association (“AMA”)..

This document would make the most left-wing advocates of Critical Race Theory and DEI proud. Here is a sampling:

“Narratives grounded in white supremacy and sustaining structural racism…perpetuate cumulative disadvantage for some populations and cumulative advantage for white people, and especially white men. Patriarchal narratives enforce rigidly defined traditional norms, and reinforce inequities based on gender. Narratives that uncritically center meritocracy and individualism render invisible the very real constraints generated and reinforced by poverty, discrimination and ultimately exclusion. Yet a rich tradition of work in health equity and related fields, including critical race theory…gives us a foundation for an alternative narrative, one that challenges the status quo, one that moves health care towards justice.”

“While equality means providing the same to all, equity requires recognizing that we do not all start from the same place because power is unevenly distributed. The process is ongoing, requiring us to identify and overcome uneven distribution of power as well as intentional and unintentional barriers arising from bias or structural root causes.”

“Seeking to treat everyone the ‘same,’ this ignores the historical legacy of disinvestment and deprivation through policy of historically marginalized and minoritized communities as well as contemporary forms of discrimination that limit opportunities. Through systematic oppression and deprivation from ethnocide, genocide, forced removal from land and slavery, Indigenous and Black people have been relegated to the lowest socioeconomic ranks of this country. The ongoing xenophobic treatment of undocumented brown people and immigrants (including Indigenous people disposed of their land in other countries) is another example.”

The AMA-AAMC screed espouses the Marxist belief in redistributing “power and resources to those most in need” and calls for forging closer ties between public health and “social movements promoting racial, economic, and social justice.”

Not that many years ago, medical schools understood that their core mission was to teach students the vital skills needed to competently diagnose and treat diseases and to perform surgeries. But that singular focus on teaching basic and clinical medicine has gone the way of doctors making house calls.

Now, medical schools are teaching their students to view medicine through a racial lens. Helping students to learn how to practice competent medicine based on the Hippocratic Oath has given way to enlisting in the progressive Left’s war for so-called “social justice.”

In short, the increasing emphasis on DEI and Critical Race Theory in medical school programs is poisoning the next generation of doctors.