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Tuesday, January 16, 2024

Johns Hopkins Hospital Makes Wrong Diagnosis


Johns Hopkins Hospital's Medical DEI chief made a very wrong diagnosis regarding the American people and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

The @EndWokeness X account released a newsletter from Chief Diversity Officer Dr. Sherita H. Golden on the January 2024 issue of Monthly Diversity Digest. The message included "privilege" as the "Diversity Word of the Month" along with a series of descriptions considered "privileged."

Dr. Golden misdiagnosed public opinion about so-called "privilege."

I'll be talking about this and the results of Iowa's Republican Caucus on the radio.

Be informed, not misled.

"Privilege is an unearned benefit given to people who are in a specific social group. Privilege operates on personal, interpersonal, cultural, and institutional levels, and it provides advantages and favors to members of dominant groups at the expense of members of other groups," the newsletter read.

It continued, "In the United States, privilege is granted to people who have membership in one or more of these social identity groups: White people, able-bodied people, heterosexuals, cisgender people, males, Christians,  owning class people, middle-aged people, and English-speaking people."

The newsletter also emphasized, "Privilege is characteristically invisible to people who have it. People in dominant groups often believe they have earned the privileges they enjoy or that everyone could have access to these privileges if only they worked to earn them. In fact, privileges are unearned and are granted to people in the dominant groups whether they want those privileges or not, and regardless of their stated intent."

After the message went viral, Golden sent out a new statement on Thursday, retracting the newsletter and claiming it was not intended to offend anyone.

How could her statement possibly offend anyone?

She said, "The newsletter included a definition of the word ‘privilege’ which, upon reflection, I deeply regret. The intent of the newsletter is to inform and support an inclusive community at Hopkins, but the language of this definition clearly did not meet that goal. In fact, because it was overly simplistic and poorly worded, it had the opposite effect of being exclusionary and hurtful to members of our community." 

"I retract and disavow the definition I shared, and I am sorry. I will work to ensure that future messages better reflect our organizational values."

Her response reveals she knew exactly what she was saying in the original message, she simply did not expect the public reaction.

A Beverly Hills plastic surgeon slammed the "corrosive ideology of DEI" impacting her profession, saying it lowers standards and endangers patients.

"Every American who cares about their right to equal, skillful medical treatment should join me in condemning medicine’s DEI-fueled politicization," Dr. Sheila Nazarian wrote in an opinion column for the Jerusalem Post this week.

"Sacrificing our evaluative standards for misguided hierarchies of oppression has real, vital risks for the millions of people who seek medical care each year," she warned. 

She said, "In the wake of the October 7 attacks, the world watched as leading universities, human rights organizations, and so-called progressive groups fell over themselves to excuse the rape and slaughter by Hamas. For many, it came as a shock. For myself, it was the logical escalation of the poisonous ideology that has captured leading American institutions – including in my own field, medicine, where Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies have overtaken schools, research programs, and professional associations."

"Now, the corrosive consequences of medicine’s widespread embrace of identity politics are on full display, with top medical institutions going silent on the Hamas attacks despite their heartfelt statements on Black Lives Matter and Ukraine, and doctors carrying out blatant public displays of antisemitism, sometimes without disciplinary consequences," she said.

She continued: "This politicization of the American medical system does not stop with hiring and curricula. It has also swept through medical research, in the form of a methodology called “public health critical race praxis” which places a chief focus on race in public health through research objectives like 'prioritizing perspectives of marginalized groups.' These racialized metrics have taken hold at America’s leading medical institutions, influencing their research objectives and diminishing their internal rigor."

Dr. Nazarian says, "In medicine, rather than creating a more equitable medical system, DEI reduces the world to a flawed hierarchy of victimhood, advancing a worldview so riddled with hypocrisy and antisemitism that it now leads its supposed champions of the marginalized to celebrate terrorism and justify the murder of Jews. 

How are Jewish patients meant to feel safe in the care of doctors who opened Twitter on October 7 to post, “What a Beautiful Morning, What a Beautiful Day,” or logged onto Instagram to comment that “Zionist settlers” got a “taste of their own medicine?”

She notes, "The growing numbers of future medical professionals being trained within the antisemitic strictures of the DEI regime raise serious risks about their ability to regard all patients with equal care and respect."

The doctor concludes, "Sacrificing our evaluative standards for misguided hierarchies of oppression has real, vital risks for the millions of people who seek medical care each year."

"With the schools’ excuses gone and the dangers of their identity politics laid sickeningly clear, it shouldn’t just be doctors like myself raising the alarm. Every American who cares about their right to equal, skillful medical treatment should join me in condemning medicine’s DEI-fueled politicization."

Takeaway

Doctor Ben Carson, whose medical career was at Johns Hopkins, has long been a strong advocate for merit-based evaluation in the medical field---not "equity."

He has repeatedly called for meritocracy in the medical field.

Jesus also believed in evaluating based on merit.

Read the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25:14-30, and you will note that Jesus taught Capitalism and meritocracy.

Be Informed. Be Discerning. Be Vigilant. Be Engaged. Be Prayerful.