“Racial Caucusing”: DEI, Med-school Segregation, and Woke Doctors

By Selwyn Duke

Maybe you’ll be able to call the physician who treats you in the future the DoubleplusGood Doctor. Oh, he perhaps won’t know much about human anatomical structure, but everything about structural racism. And if you’re sick and he renders the diagnosis “white and privileged,” you just may be able to know he’s a graduate of UCLA med school.

The Wall Street Journal explains why:

If you’ve heard that the diversity, equity and inclusion agenda is going away, don’t believe it. An emerging practice at elite medical schools segregates students by race to teach them about alleged structural racism in healthcare.

The University of California Los Angeles School of Medicine requires that first year students take a class called “Structural Racism and Health Equity” as part of the standard curriculum. In one exercise for the course, students divide by racial group and retreat to different areas to discuss antiracist prompts.

This is known as racial caucusing, a teaching device that UCLA describes as an “anti-racist pedagogical tool” to “provide a reflective space for us to explore how our positionality — particularly our racial identities as perceived within clinical spaces — influence our interaction with patients, colleagues and other staff.”

… Medical students in the class are asked to choose which of three racial categories they will identify with. They can select among “white student caucus group,” “Non-Black People of Color (NBPOC) student caucus group” or “Black student caucus group.”

By the way, the above provides just a taste of the kind of pseudo-intellectual academic jargon (e.g., “positionality”) that has been used in nonsensical parody papers that have fooled, and were published by, “esteemed” academic journals. (One blamed climate change on the male phallus.)

Aside from being ridiculous, however, in UCLA’s case the endeavor is also illegal, the Journal tells us, citing watchdog group Do No Harm; the school’s racial segregation violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the group states.

Don’t think pulling a Rachel Dolezal will help you here, either. UCLA insists you categorize your race based on how others identify you. We “ask that you identify [with] the group in which you feel you are most perceived as in clinical spaces,” the school writes. Whether UCLA also demands this of men who wish to “identify” as women, or vice versa, was not reported.

The racial caucusing is imperative, claims UCLA, because white people are often uneasy discussing their race without “Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC)” present, while black people find addressing race/racism with non-blacks present “burdensome and exhausting.” (Yes, exiting an echo chamber where people just nod along in agreement is taxing.)

The Journal also informs that Do No Harm filed a civil-rights complaint against UCLA with the San Francisco Office for Civil Rights, prompting the school to abruptly cancel the caucusing exercise; this indicates, the Journal concludes, that the institution’s administrators know they’re on shaky legal ground. UCLA is a public school that accepts federal funds and is thus constrained by anti-discrimination law.

There is much to unpack here. First, just last Thursday I wrote about how wokeness/DEI has already been used to dumb-down standards in the air-traffic-controller corps, for United Airlines pilots, and at the Boeing Company. Just days later and as if to say “Hold my beer,” the Federal Aviation Administration, we learned, has in diversity’s name been seeking to hire people with “severe intellectual” and “psychiatric” disabilities. And now, thanks to UCLA, if you’re injured in a woke plane crash you can be treated by a woke doctor.

We’ve already witnessed PC medicine, too. According to a Fox News report, New York state said in 2021 that it would “prioritize non-White people in the distribution of COVID-19 treatments in short supply.”

As for segregation, while the Left declared it anathema in the 1950s and ’60s, it’s now a new woke value. Consider the following examples:

• In 2018, George Mason University, in Virginia, held a separate orientation for black students. The College Fix reported that this “Black Freshman Orientation” “has become an annual event there.”
• Some universities are offering special dorm wings for black students.
• Students around the nation have demanded no-whites-allowed “safe spaces” for blacks.
• The University of Minnesota offers a “Tongues Untied” program that excludes straight people and whites, Campus Reform informed in 2017.
• It was reported in 2015 that a NYC school was asking third-graders their race and then dividing them into “affinity groups” (i.e., racial groups) for racial tolerance training (i.e., politically correct indoctrination).
• We learned in 2021 that a “Racial Justice Task Force” commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania had prescribed a “permanent shared space for black student-athletes.”
• Also in 2021, a Denver-area elementary school had planned a “families of color playground night” (but no corresponding “people of no color playground night”).
• Some Seattle region public agencies had implemented “race-segregated diversity trainings that teach employees, in the words of one training manual, to ‘accept responsibility for their own racism’ and ‘question the white power structure,’” wrote City Journal in 2020.

Unfortunately, The Wall Street Journal is certainly right: Despite recent pushback, DEI isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. It is, in fact, just the latest iteration of a longstanding left-wing agenda that in its more nascent stages was called “affirmative action” and “quotas”; and even if “DEI,” per se, were “nixed,” it would just be rebranded.

After all, at issue here is a religion for the irreligious — and religions, even false ones, die hard. If you doubt this, just witness how ardently godless activists worship their DEIty.

                       This article was originally published at The New American.