Guest post: This ideology-first movement

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on Nasty snobbish gatekeepers.

iknklast:

In order to provide equity and justice in medicine, we must be aware of sex, ethnic background, country of origin, and other characteristics. We do not need medicine centered on those characteristics, though. We need medicine centered on medical expertise.

You’d think that obvious, but this ideology-first movement has been in action for a while now. Sort of like how the warnings of (some) lesbians and (some) feminists regarding nascent Genderism went unheard, so too have the warnings regarding the spread of Social Justice Lysenkoism. Here’s a Boston Review article from March 2021 entitled “An Antiracist Agenda for Medicine” that argues for “medical restitution”. One form of redress the authors propose is “race-explicit protocol changes (such as preferentially admitting patients historically denied access to certain forms of medical care).” Yes, you read that right: explicit endorsement of racial discrimination in healthcare.

Pretty good example of DEI gone mad, I should think, but at least it’s not CR … Oh. … Oh, my.

Our path to this realization, as with nearly all advancements in social medicine, took us outside our discipline—through the field of critical race theory (CRT), in particular. … Recognizing this problem, public health scholars Chandra Ford and Collins Airhihenbuwa brought CRT’s legal approach to the public health realm in 2010 with their landmark proposal of a Public Health Critical Race Framework. Following their lead, we have sought to implement that framework in our own advocacy and clinical work on equitable heart failure admissions.

Well, now I have to take a look at that 2010 proposal. … … … Holy wow. No hiding the CRT here, just pure praise. We even get the discipline’s usual straw man version of colorblindness:

Colorblindness, which is both an attitude and a school of thought, posits that nonracial factors (e.g., income) fundamentally explain ostensibly racial phenomena. … Only colorblindness, however, precludes explicit examination of racism’s potential contributions to inequities.

Great googly moogly.

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