Despite Martin Luther King’s dream that people be treated based on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, a group of health care professionals have experienced discriminatory indoctrination sessions at a North Carolina medical school that they say violate the Civil Rights Act.
Contrary to their name, anti-racism initiatives promote discriminatory practices in health care by teaching physicians to treat people differently based on skin color rather than as an individual, he said.
Goldfarb, a retired physician, was a member of the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine when he said began to see social justice theories creep into medical education.
“It became very distressing because the idea became to teach medical students more and more about social issues while making them advocates for various political positions,” Goldfarb said. “This has no real role in health care. A doctor’s job is to treat a sick patient, not cure social ills in the communities about which they really don’t have a good understanding or any of the tools they need to fix those problems. That’s the province of social workers and politicians, not the physician.”
Those who advocate for social justice training do so by asserting that it will make for a better physician; however, Goldfarb said that doesn’t add up.
Social Justice at the Expense of Medical Training
DNH’s report, compiled through public record requests from the University of North Carolina’s School of Medicine (UNC SOM), shows that the school paid the North Carolina-based activists consulting firm the Racial Equity Institute (REI) $96,000 for “anti-racism and microaggression” training between March and June of 2021 “at the expense of rigorous medical and scientific instruction.”“One of UNC SOM’s top new priorities is to ‘integrate social justice into the curriculum,’ which guarantees that rigor, excellence, objectivity, and the pursuit of scientific knowledge will take a back seat to divisive political and social agendas and enforcement of their dogmas,” the report states.
The aggressiveness with which North Carolina’s flagship medical school imposes radical political ideologies on its students should concern patients, the report states.
“It also generates questions about the rights of UNC SOM medical students to pursue their education free from being compelled to participate in and express support for political causes,” the report says.
According to DNH, the UNC SOM’s annual Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion report announced a requirement that each department develops an “Inclusive Excellence Plan” involving “the creation of diversity councils and committees, and efforts to mandate diversity, equity, and inclusion in the school’s appointments, promotions, and tenure process.”
Science departments such as biochemistry, biophysics, pharmacology, and nutrition, according to the report, have “committed to making meaningful changes in [our] operations to reduce demographic imbalances in the faculty and to contribute to dismantling the pervasive systematic racism that plagues academic research.”
The report found that UNC SOM also supports “overt racial preferences” in the hiring process.
“The school’s Rising Star Program says its goal is to ‘increase diversity among faculty members in the basic sciences, with a focus on postdoctoral fellows from historically underrepresented groups,” the report says.
UNC SOM and REI didn’t immediately reply to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.
Critical Race Theory
Leading education institutions in North Carolina have become platforms for elements of Critical Race Theory (CRT), Goldfarb said.“The basic presumption is that black people are being oppressed by white people, and that’s the reason for any discrepancies between health outcomes for black people versus white people is the result of this oppression, and that can only be remedied by discriminatory practices that favor black people in one way or another,” Goldfarb said.
CRT has infiltrated every level of the institution: who gets hired, who gets admitted, how the courses get taught and what social-justice ideologies are incorporated, how much employees must go through bias training, who gets grants, and how much is required for someone to show how in sync they are with these ideologies to get promoted in the academic ranks, Goldfarb said.
Though CRT is a Marxist philosophy that claims society is a class struggle between oppressors and the oppressed, specifically labeling white people as the oppressors and all other races as the oppressed, the phrase has come to encompass for many teachers and parents a more expansive trend that incorporates not only issues of race but also themes of sexuality.
DNH’s report also found themes of sexual indoctrination within UNC SOM’s Department of Urology, which advertised itself as the “regional leader in transgender care” with its implementation of the UNC Transgender Health Program.
“This program will operate alongside the Gender Affirming Care Clinic, the Pediatric and Adolescent Clinic for Gender Wellness, and the UNC Psychiatry Gender Equity and Wellness Initiative,” the report states.
A Major Initiative With Federal Incentives
Goldfarb said DNH has discovered this to be the major initiative in top medical schools throughout the country.“These schools spend enormous amounts of money—hundreds of thousands of dollars—to come in and teach anti-racism, implicit bias training to the faculty that’s required to either be promoted, hired, or just to maintain employment at the institution,” Goldfarb said.
Following this, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued regulations on how physicians can receive financial incentives if they are enrolled in Medicare’s Merit-Based Incentive Payment System.
“The plan should include a clinic-wide review of existing tools and policies, such as value statements or clinical practice guidelines, to ensure that they include and are aligned with a commitment to anti-racism and an understanding of race as a political and social construct, not a physiological one,” the document states.
In addition to its watchdog operations, Goldfarb said DNH supports several lawsuits challenging discriminatory protocols in health care, such as one against the federal government regarding the financial incentives to implement discriminatory protocols.
Undermining the Hippocratic Oath
DNH’s other efforts include taking tips on its website from people at various institutions who wish to report discriminatory practices.DNH’s objective, Goldfarb said, is to bring about the best health care for every American, unrelated to their race, color, or their personal views.
The introduction of discriminatory practices, however, is undermining the Hippocratic Oath, and the whole basis of medical ethics, which he said is “to do the best for that patient who is right in front of you.”
“We want to treat everybody as an individual, and we want to treat them in the best way possible,” he said.
