Stuck in Wokeness's Waiting Room

The medical profession is increasingly captured by DEI. My own professional limbo is only a small part of the story.

The essay below was published on April 17, which marked the two-year anniversary of my lifetime ban by the American College of Surgeons for speaking out against the embrace by the leadership of critical race theory and antiracism in the guise of DEI. Knowing that many people do not have a subscription to the National Review, I present the text of my piece below. I would respectfully ask that anyone who reads this and shares my concerns, sign my petition for reinstatement of my rightful privileges in the ACS, in which I supposedly remain a Fellow “in good standing.” Thank you.

The edifice of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), a reasonable-sounding concept that serves as a dog whistle for critical race theory and is premised on the claim that our country is systemically racist, is cracking. But the road to the dismantling of this illiberal, anti-science, racist, and now antisemitic ideology promises to be long and hard. There will be a lot of collateral damage in this battle, as DEI ideology has spread everywhere, including the medical field.

Examples abound. Just recently, medical colleagues of my generation watched in disbelief as first-year students at UCLA’s School of Medicine were forced to attend a mandatory lecture on structural racism given by Lisa Gray-Garcia in which they were led in chants of “Free Palestine” and told to kneel in prayer to “Mama Earth.” Gray-Garcia is not a physician. She is a self-proclaimed “formerly unhoused, incarcerated, revolutionary journalist, lecturer, poet, visionary, teacher and single mama.” She is a “Poverty Scholar” in UCLA’s Activist in Residence program. This is who UCLA is enlisting to educate future physicians.

DEI now has a veritable stranglehold on top medical institutions. Massachusetts General Hospital, regarded as one of the premier medical institutions in the U.S., has now come out with a policy of no longer reporting drug-addicted babies because the mothers are disproportionately black. To report this would therefore be “racist.” Whether the report might be true is irrelevant. As with all things DEI, if there is a disparity, it is deemed to be due to structural racism.

Not long ago, you didn’t have to worry whether your surgeon was selected for training based on skin color rather than on merit. Never did you have to wonder if your surgeon was advanced through training not because of their demonstrated competency but because the residency-program director knew that dropping a marginal candidate of an underrepresented minority might result in accusations of racism and could entail serious career risk. Things have changed.

And it’s not just medical schools and hospitals. Professional medical societies aren’t immune, either. I have witnessed the transformation of the American College of Surgeons (ACS) from a professional organization dedicated to excellence in surgery to an illiberal promoter of radical racial ideology. According the ACS Bulletin of January 8, 2021, I am now a “white, heteronormative male who lacks an appreciation or awareness of the importance of diversity [and] fails to acknowledge this deficit, then incorrectly claims to be culturally dexterous.” The risk of “such a cognitive bias” is ultimately the “perpetuation of the lack of diversity in the surgical workforce.” Diversity is now the lodestar in surgery, trumping merit and excellence.

Such a misplaced focus couldn’t come at a worse time. Surgery is in trouble. The U.S. faces a projected shortfall of up to 30,000 surgeons by 2034. Today, the U.S. is short 2,500 trauma surgeons. Meanwhile, ACS leadership dithers with “anti-racism” and DEI initiatives, adds anti-racism to its values, installs an entire new internal Department of Diversity (at what cost?), and has even developed a comprehensive DEI Toolkit for training and practicing surgeons. Surgeons, of course, have nothing better to do than take courses in white privilege, implicit bias, microaggressions, settler colonialism, anti-racism, and other topics intended to indoctrinate those who are white in their undeserved privilege and those who are minorities in their eternal victimhood.

The ACS leadership has accepted without evidence that all disparities in surgery are due to racism. It is relentlessly pursuing proportional racial representation and even promoting the execrable racist concept of racial concordance that posits that patients do better if their surgeon is of the same race. You will not find a better recipe for racial strife, division, and mistrust.

If any fellow of the ACS dares to speak up and question the obvious embrace of critical race theory, anti-racism, and DEI by the ACS leadership, he or she is slapped down, silenced, and isolated — even if doing so requires suspension of due process and violation of the ACS’s own rules for disciplining its members. I know because this is what happened to me. Today marks the second year of my lifetime ban from engagement with my fellow surgeons by the ACS Board of Regents, who have the audacity to tell me I remain in “good standing.” This is classic gaslighting.

The ACS leadership’s racist claims should be anathema to every surgeon. Its elevation of DEI over merit and excellence, and its goal of proportionate representation, is demeaning to minority surgeons. These priorities condemn them to a career in which others will always wonder, with good reason, if they made it on merit or based on their skin color.

While my surgical colleagues and I are collateral damage in this culture war within the ACS, the real damage will be to our patients, who trust us with their lives and will suffer as the quality of surgery in the U.S. continues to decline.

Richard T. Bosshardt, MD, FACS