“A Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons proposal to teach Canadian medical students more about ‘anti-racism’ and ‘oppression’ than ‘medical expertise’ has doctors and academics alarmed,” reports The College Fix. “Do No Harm, a medical watchdog group, launched a petition for physicians to oppose the recommendation, saying it would ‘corrupt medicine’ in Canada.”
“The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons may force medical students to learn more about ‘anti-racism’ than actual medicine. Canadian health care is on the fast track to racial division and discrimination,” laments Do No Harm.
The proposal to downgrade medical expertise comes from a report by the college’s Anti-Racism Expert Working Group. The Royal College oversees Canadian medical school programs.
Its interim report says medical training should center around “values such as anti-oppression, anti-racism, and social justice, rather than medical expertise.”
The report recommends “de-centering medical expertise” and instead refocusing medical school training on “anti-racism,” “anti-oppression,” “social justice and equity,” “inclusive compassion,” and “decolonization.”
“This is not satire. These parasitic idea pathogens will destroy the world,” said Concordia University Professor Gad Saad.
Saad, an evolutionary behavioral scientist in Quebec, learned about the report from a doctor who is worried by the proposals.
The report makes recommendations regarding the Royal College’s CanMEDS, the framework for physician training in Canada; it is scheduled to be updated in 2025, according to Do No Harm.
In the report, the working group says CanMEDS currently focuses too much on “medical expertise over all other facets of medical care” and downplays “critical aspects of medical practice such as advocacy, collaboration and communication….We are proposing a shift towards a model that centres values” such as “anti-racism and anti-oppression.” The working group also wants medical students to be taught to believe in “power structures that have come into existence over centuries which shape everything we do daily, e.g., White supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism.”
Dr. Roy Eappen, an endocrinologist and senior fellow with Do No Harm, said the proposal is very alarming in its implications for the future of medicine in Canada.
“Patients expect competence from their physicians in diagnoses and treatment,” Eappen stated. “They expect compassion and a thorough knowledge of their field and the emerging knowledge in their fields. The Royal College has a long tradition of excellence in teaching and upholding the profession. The new proposals seem to abrogate that tradition of excellence. We do not do our patients or our profession any favours by taking our eyes off the real goal of patient care and wellness.”
The report’s hostility to “capitalism” is common for “antiracist” reports. “To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism…Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” says the best-selling book promoting critical race theory, How to Be An Antiracist. That book is a “comprehensive introduction to critical race theory,” gushes the leading progressive media organ Slate.
The “key concept” in Ibram Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist was that discrimination against whites is the only way to achieve equality: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” wrote Kendi in that book. Kendi has been described by progressive publications as a leading “critical race theorist.”
Also emanating from antiracist ideology is hostility to “western scientific ways of knowing,” such as objectivity and the scientific method. Such hostility will help you get a job in the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As economic historian Phil Magness notes, “This ‘faculty job’ at a tax-funded public institution is nothing more that overt far-left ideological activism in a field that almost nobody even wants to study.” Here is the job description:
POSITION DESCRIPTION
The Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department (https://cres.ucsc.edu/) at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) invites applications for a an Assistant/Associate Professor of Critical Race Science and Technology Studies (STS). We seek a scholar whose research falls in any area of Critical Race STS—including scholars trained in indigenous, critical ethnic, Black, gender, and/or trans studies whose work critically engages the embedded racism, sexism, and colonial violence of science and scientific worldviews and their correlate, enlightenment humanism. A demonstrated record of research that de-centers Western scientific ways of knowing and challenges extractivist capitalist practices is especially welcome as are commitments to queer and indigenous ecologies, trans-species studies, and race-radical approaches to STEM. In addition to teaching responsibilities for the new Science and Justice minor, which CRES is developing in collaboration with the Science and Justice Research Center, this position requires a clear commitment to and willingness to lead programmatic and curricular development for the new interdisciplinary minor. Ideal applicants will demonstrate an approach to science and technology grounded in histories of and innovative methods of analyzing anticolonial, decolonizing, liberationist political thought and praxis, push the boundaries of the fields they inhabit, ask provocative questions, and relate critically and creatively to norms of knowledge production. Potential areas of research and teaching focus, among various areas of expertise, include but are not limited to environmental racism; climate justice; genomic justice; war technologies; medicine; public health; governance of science and technology; science policy; criminology, surveillance, and policing; border control; educational technologies; new media studies; critical data studies; histories of antiracism and anticolonialism in science, including the impact of grassroots collective and communal movements against racist science; and CRES engagement with the creative arts that facilitates a nexus between creative and critical inquiry.
One offshoot of “antiracism” is critical ethnic studies. K-12 students are also being required to take classes in critical ethnic studies or critical race theory. Hispanic students in a California school district were forced to learn critical race theory. They hated it, reported Reason Magazine.
“Less than half of high school students in St. Paul Public Schools (SPPS) are proficient in math or reading but” soon all of them “will be required to take a Critical Ethnic Studies (CES) course before they can graduate,” reports the Center of the American Experiment:
The graduation requirement will first apply to the class of 2025, who will take the one semester class as 10th graders in the 2022-2023 school year, according to school communication.
Course concepts will include: identity, intersectionality, race, dominant/counter narratives, racism, white supremacy, racial equity, oppression, systemic oppression, resistance and resilience, social/youth-led movements, civic engagement, hope and healing, and transformation and change.
If state education bureaucracies had their way, critical race theory would become more common in school curriculums. In 2015, under Governor Terry McAuliffe (D), Virginia’s Department of Education instructed public schools to “embrace critical race theory” in order to “re-engineer attitudes and belief systems.’”
Detroit’s school superintendent, Nikolai Vitti, said that critical race theory is deeply embedded in his school system: “Our curriculum is deeply using critical race theory, especially in social studies, but you’ll find it in English language arts and the other disciplines. We were very intentional about … embedding critical race theory within our curriculum.”
Virginia’s largest school system, the progressive Fairfax County Public Schools, encouraged teachers to apply critical race theory. The Washington Times reported that a “slide presentation” in 2021 “instructed social studies teachers in Fairfax County Public Schools that ‘critical race theory is a frame’ for their work.”
The progressive Arlington County schools have students read books by critical race theorists such as Ibram Kendi. Arlington distributed hundreds of copies of Ibram Kendi’s book Stamped to students at Wakefield High School. The book contains many errors and celebrates a Marxist anti-Semite. It also peddles conspiracy theories and is dismissive about Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass. At Arlington’s Washington-Lee High School, most students in 9th grade English were assigned to read either Stamped or a much longer book that would require more work to read. Virtually all students chose to read Stamped as a result.
The Loudoun County, VA public schools paid a contractor to train their staff in critical race theory, giving it $3,125 to conduct “Critical Race Theory Development.”
Under Democratic governor Ralph Northam, Virginia’s official “Roadmap to Equity” published by its Department of Education in 2020 thanked critical race theorist “Dr. Ibram X. Kendi” in its acknowledgments section, as having “informed the development of the EdEquityVA Framework.” Kendi says he was “inspired by critical race theory,” and that he cannot “imagine a pathway to” his teachings “that does not engage CRT.”
