https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/authors/john_murawski/
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.
Is U.S. health care against her? Lately medical journals, drawing on critical race theory, implicate the profession in untold numbers of black and brown deaths.
Klaus Nielsen
Some activist physicians describe the present-day health care system with such ominous terms as a “medical caste system” or “medical apartheid,” the latter locution taken from the title of a 2007 book about America’s history of medical experimentation on enslaved blacks and freedmen.
“Modern American medicine has historical roots in scientific racism and eugenics movements,” according to a February article in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “How Structural Racism Works — Racist Policies as a Root Cause of U.S. Racial Health Inequities.” “Black communities became medical training grounds and a source of profit, reinforcing the American medical caste system that we have today.”
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.
While racialized politics has infused every corner of American life, the moral stakes in the health care arena go far beyond, say, the perceived slights called microaggressions. The medical literature, lately drawing on critical race theory, depicts the health care industry itself as a historical source of illness in — and even killing of — black and brown bodies. That would make medicine analogous to policing and criminal justice, the other social institutions directly blamed for maiming and murdering black people.