It’s no secret that medicine has become increasingly woke.
As I noted in the Daily Sceptic last year, the American Medical Association advocates “the removal of sex as a legal designation on the public portion of the birth certificate” on the grounds that it “fails to recognize the medical spectrum of gender identity”. So that organisation has fully embraced transgender identity politics.
In a must-read article, Heather Mac Donald documents how the medical establishment has also embraced racial identity politics.
“Medical schools and medical societies”, she notes, “are discarding traditional standards of merit in order to alter the demographic characteristics of their profession”. According to economist Mark Perry, black students are seven times more likely to be admitted to medical school than similarly qualified white students, and more than nine times more likely than Asian students.
Laxer entry requirements for black students mean that those who get admitted perform less well. A recent study based on data from 6 medical schools found that black residents were consistently rated lower than white or Asian residents. However, the authors ignored the obvious explanation for these disparities, and concluded they must be due to “bias in faculty assessment, effects of a non-inclusive learning environment, or structural inequities in assessment.”
Professor Stanley Goldfarb wasn’t convinced. “Could it be they were just less good at being residents?”, he opined on Twitter. In response to this perfectly reasonable (and almost certainly correct) suggestion, Goldfarb was deluged with accusations of “racism”. One user said he “might be the most garbage human I’ve seen with my own eyes”. He was then admonished in an official email by the chair of his own department.
Read More: Woke Medicine Abandons Meritocracy and Sense
