After the death of George Floyd, the University of California’s David Geffen School of Medicine mandated that all first-year students take a DEI course titled “Structural Racism and Health Equity.”
The course does not provide students with insights into better suturing techniques, healing methods, disease detection, biochemistry, or other conventionally useful medical skills. Rather, its stated purpose is to endow prospective physicians with a “structurally competent, anti-racist lens for viewing and treating health and illness.”
The course recently made headlines after a guest lecturer who celebrated the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks led students in chanting, “Free, Free Palestine,” as well as in pagan earth worship. It appears its contents are similarly provocative.
According to a course syllabus and corresponding documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, students will learn about
- how Western societies and the medical profession are supposedly racist;
- how morbid obesity “came to be pathologized and medicalized in racialized terms”;
- the apparent connection between “ableism” and “heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism and capitalism”;
- the supposed positives of sex-change mutilation;
- the apparent value in abolishing prisons;
- “how race and class contributes to a patient’s ability to access and receive gender-affirming care”; and
- the “role of healthcare workers within community organizing and protest.”
Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School, told the Beacon the mandatory course “promotes extensive and dangerous misinformation.
The university “has centered this required course on a socialist/Marxist ideology that is totally inappropriate,” continued Flier. “As a longstanding medical educator, I found this course truly shocking.”
Slides from the first session make clear that the aim is to transform future doctors into progressive activists.
A section entitled “Our Hxstories” reportedly adds that “[h]ealth and medical practice are deeply impacted by racism and other intersectional structures of power, hierarchy, and oppression — all of which require humility, space and patience to understand, deconstruct, and eventually rectify.”
Another reading provides potential doctors with a list of demands to echo, including calls for a cancellation of Third World debt; state-controlled agricultural policies responding “to people’s needs and not to the demands of the market”; state control and taxation of speculative international capital flows; gender, equity, and environmental impact assessments for all economic polices; and an end to “growth-centered economic theories.”
Last month, Ben Shapiro noted that students in the course “are told to read about wars of ‘Indigenous resistance’ — in which Native Americans killed thousands of white people — to ‘imagine what liberation could look like.'”
South African billionaire Elon Musk said of the course documents, “This is messed up.”
Students at the medical school whose DEI czar was just outed as a likely plagiarist are also given a heavy reading from the self-described “fat liberationist” Marquisele Mercedes that claims that “weight loss is a useless, hopeless endeavor” and that the “relationship between weight and health is also muddy.”
Mercedes, a grad student based in New York City, intimates in her quasi-autobiographical rant that an aversion to morbid obesity — a term she partially censors — is rooted in racism.
“This is a profoundly misguided view of obesity, a complex medical disorder with major adverse health consequences for all racial and ethnic groups,” said Flier. “Promotion of these ignorant ideas to medical students without counterbalancing input from medical experts in the area is nothing less than pedagogical malpractice.”
The former Harvard Medical School dean stressed that whoever signed off on the curriculum was unfit to make such decisions.
“There are areas where medicine and public health intersect with politics, and these require discussion and debate of conflicting viewpoints,” Flier told the Beacon. “That is distinct from education designed to ideologically indoctrinate physician-activists.”
Nationally syndicated radio host and co-founder of Blaze Media Glenn Beck recently highlighted how the medical profession watchdog Do No Harm has revealed “23 of America’s top 25 medical schools now have anti-racism instruction as the core part of their curriculum.”
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