Winds of Change Bring a VP of 'Humanism, Equity and Antiracism' to an American Medical School

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

So the doctor delivers troubling health news, and your first response is concern: Was he/she/they trained in antiracism?

If that’s a scenario that hits home, you’ll be glad to know a California and Oregon-based school is doing its part in the arena of preventive medicine.

Advertisement

There’s a salve that pummels the problematic.

As announced online, a West Coast medical school has employed its very first “Vice President for Humanism, Equity, and Antiracism.”

From the news release:

After a national search, Western University of Health Sciences (WesternU) has appointed Suresh Appavoo, EdD, as its…Vice President for Humanism, Equity, and Anti-Racism, reporting directly to the president and serving as senior administrative leadership.

You may not have heard of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” until two years ago; you may have just gotten word of “antiracism” this year — in fact, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist was only released in 2019. But for Suresh, inexperience won’t be an issue:

Appavoo brings more than 30 years’ experience in higher education leading Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) and Anti-Racist initiatives, plans and programs.

He holsters, the school assures, “the depth of education and experience to help us realize to the fullest our values of humanism, diversity, inclusion, equity, and anti-racism.”

Western University certainly isn’t the only organization trumpeting such virtue.

Columbia’s Medical school — the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons — recently launched workshops on “disrupting racism” and microaggression management.

Advertisement

The elite training mecca also issued “anti-bias” guidelines promoting “people with uteruses” and insisting that “race is a social construct.”

At the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, nominations to the honor society were suspended in July.

The reason: Grades may be racist.

Enlightenment is upgrading health institutions in other ways, too: Mayo Clinic has revised its dress policy to include pronoun buttons.

And the CDC’s declared racism a public health crisis.

Outside the medical realm, Boston University offered a summertime “21 Days of Unlearning Racism and Learning Antiracism.”

Last month, the University of Tennessee-Knoxville’s College of Social work provided “antiracism” workshops and posed that the absence of white people might manifest magic.

Meanwhile, Penn State is reimagining K-12 through an antiracism lens, and aspiring knights of justice can acquire a Bachelor’s Degree in antiracism at New Hampshire’s Keene State College.

The University of North Carolina offers a graduate degree in the same.

And Coca-Cola, you may recall, asked its staff to “be less white” earlier this year.

Antiracism’s even made its way to kids’ little league baseball.

For clarity, what is antiracism? According to CNN, it’s an ideology that opposes the “microaggression” of colorblindness.

Advertisement

Per UCLA Law Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, it’s “the active dismantling of systems, privileges, and everyday practices that reinforce and normalize the contemporary dimensions of white dominance.”

Here’s a video for added instruction:

Back to WesternU, new VP Suresh says he’s psyched:

“The core value of humanism and an institutional commitment to equity and anti-racism are what drew me to this inaugural leadership role at WesternU. Based on the foundations built through the hard work of many here who came before me, I aspire to collaboratively engage the hearts, heads, and hands of our community and serve as a bridge between intentions and outcomes. I am inspired by the many people at WesternU who believe that we can be the change that we want to see. Echoing powerfully hopeful words from the Freedom Summer of 1964, I invite you all to ‘Come, let us build a new world together’ – a humanistic, equitable, anti-racist, and inclusive world at WesternU.”

As for the school’s focus, how is “antiracism” relevant to biology or the administrative requirements to enroll the best and brightest and instill them with knowledge and skill? I believe, perhaps, such a question is no longer relevant.

It’s beginning to look as if there are no schools, no companies, no departments…there is only wokeness. All things exist to promote wokeness. All former purposes are canceled — ’til we whack white supremacy.

Advertisement

And if it’s that pervasive a disease, we indeed must stop the spread.

We once lived on a partitioned planet. The world was colossally compartmentalized.

It’s a new era, in which Portland State University’s president names racial justice and equity as the school’s top priority — and where the State Department goes to bat for International Pronoun Day.

As for medicine, doctors currently have specialties.

Perhaps one day, every MD’s specialty will just be inclusion.

If so, on that day…get well soon.

-ALEX

 

See more pieces from me:

Rutgers Professor Identifies America’s Enemy: White Mothers, and Not the ‘Mom’ Kind

‘Hateful Conduct’: Congressman Gets Corked for Calling a Four-Star Admiral a ‘Man’

Out to Pasture, Gender Unicorn — the University of Arkansas Serves Sweeter Sex Ed

Find all my RedState work here.

Thank you for reading! Please sound off in the Comments section below.

Recommended

Join the conversation as a VIP Member

Trending on RedState Videos