By Kevin McGary 11/28/2023
DEI-driven activists are reimagining medical practice to deliver healthcare depending upon a patient’s race, sex, gender, and rank on the “oppressor” scale. Patients are treated or not treated based upon their race, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender identity, social class, ability, immigration status, and more. How does that make sense? Measuring a patient’s political-social worthiness cannot be the doctors’ job when healthcare is needed.
Commentary
Continued from Part I
A ubiquitous global trend toward Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) exists. This new trend’s emergence brings dilemmas confirming profound hypocrisy and grotesque duplicity, so it must be rejected, not celebrated.
Ignoring obviously inconvenient truths about DEI and its unprincipled hypocrisy means hiding our heads in the sand. That isn’t comforting or practical; it’s cowardice! It won’t be easy, but we must attempt to make sense out of DEI nonsense.
DEI Versus Sound Medical Practice
When DEI tactics and practices influence medical practitioners and their responses to life-or-death decisions, everyone needs to pay close attention.
Some medical providers in the United States and Canada have begun incorporating so-called social justice, anti-racism, anti-oppression, and cultural safety to promote “equity” in medicine. But why dump the Hippocratic Oath that mandates “first do no harm”? The Oath already aimed toward providing everyone with justice and equality in healthcare, ensuring patients needing care will receive it. The Oath doesn’t look at skin color or other attributes; it calls for medical care committed to the “first do no harm” principle for all.
DEI-driven activists are reimagining medical practice to deliver healthcare depending upon a patient’s race, sex, gender, and rank on the “oppressor” scale. Patients are treated or not treated based upon their race, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender identity, social class, ability, immigration status, and more. How does that make sense? Measuring a patient’s political-social worthiness cannot be the doctors’ job when healthcare is needed.
When practitioners consider arcane factors of race, sex, etc., before helping a patient in an emergency, they are committing malpractice. The “standard of care” for physicians requires treatment that meets the acceptable performance of a practitioner in the field. That standard nowhere excuses poor performance that the doctor justifies by the patient’s race, ethnicity, sex, gender, or “oppressor” status.
Proper medical practice requires a doctor to maintain excellence in knowledge and skills, but also to recognize the doctor’s areas of non-expertise. Patients typically check a doctor’s track record and competency level before surgery. Patients don’t accept a “politically correct” surgeon for his or her social justice and DEI training; they want the best doctor available to them because of the doctor’s professional skills.
DEI advocacy and related practices within healthcare are already impacting lifesaving services and care, with no end in sight. Lives will be lost as a socio-political agenda expressly mandates unequal treatment of patients.
DEI Dismantles Education
The medical/healthcare field is just one example of DEI degrading quality and fairness. Another is the arena of education.
Believe it or not, many “educated” intellectuals assert that math, science, and English are racist power vectors. They oppose any performance testing in those subjects to measure intellectual acuity or accuracy. They allege that these ancient fundamental subjects, dating back hundreds or thousands of years, all came from “white racist” academics who sought to retain “supremacy” while undermining black development. Their claims fail the test of history while they stir up hate and resentment.
The underlying DEI “equity” thread is that black and other ethnic minority students should not be held to achievement standards concerning any academic material that white people created or developed in the past. DEI demands that everyone automatically assume that the foundational knowledge basics are infused with racist and supremacist ideologies intended to undermine blacks and continually oppress them.
DEI activists call for rejecting the presumed racist subjects and warning children against the dangers of the “white” works, ideas, and subjects. The new paradigm of equity in education urges that any “white racist” intellectual works, regardless of how they benefited societies, must be rejected as oppressive to blacks.
Sober thinking, however, means realizing the anti-education idea is obviously irrational. The DEI schemes are unserious and deem blacks as inherently inferior. Basically, DEI says: Blacks cannot learn, so education must be lessened.
Whether knowingly or ignorantly, “woke educators” broadly assert black underachievement, building upon a Darwinian theory that black students have innate learning deficiencies and so they are handicapped by oppressive school subjects. Think for a moment about how the “woke” ideas about education further those longstanding racist hypocritical tropes!
Generations of blacks have studied existing curricula from all subjects, mastered them, and are now living incredibly successful lives. Yet DEI advocates say blacks are innately inferior, i.e., incapable. They believe the only way to get black students to graduate and achieve at the same level as other ethnicities is to bend the curriculum curve downward. Society must cast off any notions of academic excellence because they are imposed by white racist paternalist hegemony.
Sincere DEI professionals working in education, especially those assuring equity, should recognize that true equity in education means that black students have access to every opportunity and resource to learn that other students have. As private schools provide additional academic choice, sincere education reformers should endorse and encourage school choice programs for all students.
Forcing children into the “one size fits all” public school paradigm contradicts “equity” by denying educational choices tailored to each child’s skill, abilities, and interests. Not having choices for learning environments that best suit the child is what causes broad inequities in future outcomes for individuals. It is a systemic lack of school choices—not purported “racist curriculums”—that causes issues with future hiring and advancement opportunities.
Hypocritically, advocates of DEI typically reject school choice. Why? DEI advocates do not embrace and champion school choice because they are more committed to a communistic structure (state-run education) and have adopted a Darwinist mindset that assumes some ethnicities innately lack learning capacities based on race. The truly uplifting pathway would commit to seeing students as individuals who can all achieve if given equal opportunities.
There is no need to degrade academics or downgrade standards to accommodate “the poor blacks.” For countless generations, blacks have demonstrated the ability to achieve excellence and overcome any barriers. Tropes that connote black inferiority may make progressive “do-gooders” feel warm and fuzzy as they condescend toward blacks, but those who espouse these ideas must be corrected.
Guilt-ridden proponents of DEI often attempt simplistic, condescending, racialized perspectives to reinforce that blacks are incapable of competing in education. Nonsense!
Corporations Surrender to Contradictions
Corporations have also fallen into the trappings and associated dilemmas of DEI. Many corporate elites proudly “beat their chests” and virtue signal about “justice,” diversity, and equality. In reality, they act more as groveling cowards than stalwarts who should stand on principles of corporate fairness and equality.
The cultural tide of Marxism has enveloped most businesses and organizations via the latest tactic of DEI initiatives. Still, instead of business “leaders” combatting and rejecting brazen anti-capitalist Marxist schemes, they humbly bow in deference to them. Why?
We have seen corporations and global organizations embrace and support Black Lives Matter (BLM) even as BLM boasted of being anti-capitalist and “revolutionary Marxists.” Most major sports teams piled on alongside corporate donors to boost BLM coffers to an estimated billion dollars.
Even if one feels bad about George Floyd’s death, why would any organizations align and support diehard Marxists as they proudly disdain and threaten them as “victimizers,” “colonialists,” “oppressors,” and evil “capitalists”? A principled response from corporations would be to push back on BLM and demand that they publicly reject Marxism before any donations could be released.
Here’s the dilemma: How can DEI initiatives inspired by and rooted in Marxism be supported and embraced by free-market/capitalist entities? Corporations and entities that espouse DEI not only put themselves at significant risk due to federal and state employment non-discrimination laws by intentionally hiring and giving promotions solely based on skin color, but they entangle themselves in Marxist duplicity by accepting forms of Marxism while operating supposedly as capitalist.
DEI’s internal contradictions, and ultimately, anti-black theories run against any genuine commitment to justice and equality for all. We cannot make sense of DEI because it is riddled with noxious ideas. The fair, reasonable, and uplifting course is to combat DEI nonsense wherever it appears.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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