It’s Time to Abolish DEI at Med Schools – Starting with the University of North Carolina
President of Color Us United, which advocates for a color blind society
PUBLIUS SPECIAL GUEST: Kenny Xu, is author of the book, An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy. He is the President of Color Us United, which advocates for a color blind society.
Imagine you’re under the scope. The operating room lights partially blind you as you drift into an anesthetic-induced coma. Barely clinging to consciousness as the doctors surround you and prepare to fix your heart, you can only hear flickers of conversation before you go. But one line is unmistakable: the last thing you hear out of your surgeon is “I don’t know how to handle these tongs…”
You may think there is no chance our medical schools would ever produce such an unqualified physician. But the lowering of standards in medicine is already happening – and it will get consistently worse until Americans put a stop to it.
New evidence emerging from UNC School of Medicine shows the school pledging to “integrate social justice into the Curriculum with Anti-racist Components” into the entirety of their health system. They wrote it all down in a 2020 document called “The Task Force to Integrate Social Justice into the Curriculum” and reaffirmed their transformation of the medical system in a February 2022 update.
So focused has the UNC School of Medicine become on “anti-racism” that a new study has found that UNC has complied 92 percent with a national Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) inventory. DEI is an extremely dangerous ideology that threatens to label institutions as racist unless they comply with outrageous demands made by Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion officers. These demands include forcing medical faculty to sign DEI statements, cutting doctor hours to learn about “unconscious bias,” and grading doctors on their “inclusivity” rather than their medical performance.
I don’t know if UNC is being held hostage by the DEI lobby or their own VPs of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are fomenting DEI themselves. All I know is this has to stop.
One of the immediate harms that DEI is inflicting upon UNC’s medical quality is its recruitment of doctors. UNC School of Medicine has already pledged to practice “holistic admissions,” meaning that they actively admit lesser-qualified doctor candidates who happen to be Black and Latino over more qualified white and Asian doctors. They justify this practice in the name of “anti-racism,” newly released documents from their School of Medicine show.
In other words, they are admitting Black and Latino doctors with lower MCAT scores and grades over white and Asian doctors with higher MCAT scores and grades. (The entire school is currently facing a Supreme Court lawsuit for this practice in their undergraduate program).
The lowering of standards for different groups in admissions represents a shift from producing the best-qualified doctors possible to producing doctors that fit racial and gender quotas in the name of DEI. Is it possible that MCAT scores are not predictive of how good a doctor will eventually turn out (although MCATs are correlated with performance on Medical Boards)? Sure, but is medicine really the place to practice such social experiments? These are patients’ lives we’re talking about here. The margin of error between life and death rests in the doctor’s hands, and you want the best quality doctor possible.
Another grave issue with DEI in medicine is the bad health advice that indoctrinated doctors will give to patients soon. UNC School of Medicine’s required textbook, the Social Medicine Reader, analyzes health disparities through the lens of “intersectionality,” talking about how “racism” impacts health outcomes.
But any good doctor knows that the predominant cause of ills in a person is that person’s own family, genes, environment, and life choices, not “racism.” That is why COVID-19 predominantly affected those who were sick, obese, old, and sedentary – yet the progressive medical community tried to blame the pandemic’s effect on Black Americans on “racism.”
A good doctor would tell his patient, honestly but frankly, that he wants to lower his risk for disease, that he should commit to a pattern of diet and exercise. But UNC Medical School now claims in its Task Force to Integrate Social Justice that “health disparities are primarily determined by structural factors, rather than by biological ones or by individual behaviors.”
This is bad advice and bad medicine. DEI is leading UNC Medical School – and other medical schools across the nation – down to road to shamanistic, feelings-based healthcare.
Medical mistakes are the third-leading cause of death in the United States, right below heart disease and cancer. Although good medicine saves lives, bad medicine kills. We cannot have bad medicine leaking into our medical institutions in the name of DEI.
UNC-Chapel Hill’s medical campus was most recently investigated by the federal government for putting patients in “immediate jeopardy.” Only 3 percent of all hospital systems are so ignobly designated, with UNC’s issues with patient rights, quality assessment, and infection control cited as evidence.
In this precarious medical environment, should UNC really be realigning its focus to combat “racism” rather than the immediate health needs of its patients?
How bad can it get? The Chinese immigrant Helen Raleigh, whose mother worked as a doctor during the Cultural Revolution, states it best: “Medical students spent less time learning medicine but more time on political indoctrination… Once graduated, these young doctors didn't know much about how to treat patients in real life.”
It’s time to say: we don’t want Cultural Revolution healthcare. My organization, Color Us United, started a petition protesting DEI in healthcare at UNC and other Medical Schools. Sign this petition if you believe healthcare should be about excellence, not social justice. We need to stand up to the DEI lobby before it completely transforms our health care system from one of high quality doctors to one excessively focused on social justice at the expense of your health.
BIO: Kenny Xu is the President of Color Us United, a raceblind advocacy group that advocates for the simple and true idea that ordinary Americans want race out of the equation in their personal and professional lives. Xu is one of the foremost experts on the anti-Asian admissions policies at the elite Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, having written about it extensively in his book, An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy.
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Kenny Xu, is author of the new book, An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy. He is the President of Color Us United, which advocates for a color blind society.