Andrew Sullivan describes the situation and the pathetic spineless nebulous apology by the Editor of journal of the American Medical Association. I invite you to visit (and support) Sullivan’s excellent substack website, “The Weekly Dish,” for the full article and a steady stream of excellent writing by Andrew Sullivan. Here’s an excerpt regarding the AMA Editor. This is who we are becoming:
I was just reading about the panic that occurred in the American Medical Association, when their journal’s deputy editor argued on a podcast that socio-economic factors were more significant in poor outcomes for non-whites than “structural racism.” As you might imagine, any kind of questioning of this orthodoxy required the defenestration of the deputy editor and the resignation of the editor-in-chief. The episode was withdrawn from public viewing, and the top editor replaced it with a Maoist apology/confession before he accepted his own fate.
But I was most struck by the statement put out in response by a group called “The Institute for Antiracism in Medicine.” Here it is:
The podcast and associated promotional message are extremely problematic for minoritized members of our medical community. Racism was created with intention and must therefore be undone with intention. Structural racism has deeply permeated the field of medicine and must be actively dissolved through proper antiracist education and purposeful equitable policy creation. The delivery of messages suggesting that racism is non-existent and therefore non-problematic within the medical field is harmful to both our underrepresented minoritized physicians and the marginalized communities served in this country.
Consider the language for a moment. I don’t want to single out this group — they are merely representative of countless others, all engaged in the recitation of certain doctrines, and I just want an example. But I do want to say that this paragraph is effectively dead, drained of almost any meaning, nailed to the perch of pious pabulum. It is prose, in Orwell’s words, that “consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.” It is chock-full of long, compounded nouns and adjectives, riddled with the passive voice, lurching and leaning, like a passenger walking the aisle on a moving train, on pre-packaged phrases to keep itself going.
Notice the unnecessary longevity: a tweet becomes an “associated promotional message.” Notice the deadness of the neologisms: “minoritized”, “marginalized”, “non-problematic”. As Orwell noted: “the normal way of coining a new word is to use a Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the -ize formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentatory and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning.” Go back and see if you can put the words “minoritized” or “non-problematic” into everyday English.
Part of the goal of this is political, of course. The more you repeat words like “proper antiracist education” or “systemic racism” or “racial inequity” or “lived experience” or “heteronormativity,” the more they become part of the landscape of words, designed to dull one’s curiosity about what on earth any of them can possible mean. A mass of ideological abstractions, in Orwell’s words, “falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.”
In modern America, this is how easy it is to get intelligent people in high places to stop saying what they are thinking. You have probably wondered, like I have, why the German people didn’t rise up to overthrow Hitler. Now think about what is happening today in the United States. People are not being sought out and killed. Their relatives are not being threatened with death. They are not being thrown into education camps. They are merely being threatened with social disapproval and economic loss. But they are so terrified, their assholes so incredibly puckered, that they are refusing to ask obvious questions and to say obvious things. Highly trained medical professionals are afraid to stand up and acknowledge the obvious need to conduct multivariate analyses to understand complex situations. They are willing to look in their mirrors in the morning knowing that they are living and speaking lies. That’s how powerful and perverted the Woke Movement is. That is why I have a difficult time walking away from this topic.
Wokeness (including the modern version of CRT) is clearly a religion (as John McWhorter argues). I’ve been through this kind of thing all my life, given that I am both an agnostic and an atheist. I’ve seen the Overton window closing on me. I’ve seen the disappointment in others as I ask obvious questions and acknowledge obvious things around me. This is giving me something like PTSD, bringing me back to the days when my well-meaning father worked overtime to jam overly-pious Catholicism down my throat. I’ve been there, seen this, and don’t know what to do about it, given that those who are captive have done the equivalent of constructing “electric fences” around numerous critically important topics in their minds, thereby nullifying the possibility that we can move forward by using Enlightenment Principles. Too many of us can’t (or won’t) talk anymore, even about the Emperor’s state of undress.
“I’ve been there, seen this, and don’t know what to do about it. . .” It seems you are already doing what you can.
On that note, I’ve been thinking about how reading about this stuff sometimes gets me very upset. I came to the conclusion that I need to accept (but not agree with) the people pushing these ideas, and view them with equanimity. This will allow my responses to come from a calm place. It will (hopefully) preclude my being sucked up into the vortex of craziness that is sweeping our culture (“Turning and turning in the widening gyre,” W.B. Yeats).
It seems to me that you are following this approach in your blog. You never come across as angry or irrational. Keep wielding the power of your own measured discourse. It is helping.
Thank you so much for this. I very much want to come across as a trustworthy voice, especially to those who disagree with me. I fear that I might look less calm because I see the far left agenda as harmful to people (including children), even though many who push the agenda are well intentioned. As I see it, they are trying to save people and I too am trying to save people. I try to step out of the fray and see it from afar, as though I were a Martian anthropologist, but I admit that it’s very difficult, for the many reasons I’d discussed over the past year or two at this website. But, again, thank you. I really appreciate that, at least to you, I am not looking like I’m writing from anger.
I am on the verge of screaming about this. The AMA is an organization that claims to represent scientists. Let us then apply the scientific method to the AMA’s statement. It begins with whether the issue exists, not what people have faith claim to exist. Present first evidence that racism was intentionally created. Then present evidence that it can only be removed intentionally. Next, present evidence that racism is structurally embedded in medicine. Practitioners do not accept as fact unsubstantiated assertions, although we do accept them as untested evidence.
The next step is to present evidence that racism was not intentionally created. As much as Woke, Inc, wants us to accept that racism is a unique evil unlike any other form of tribalism, I find it no different from nationality, language, mode of dress, party label or other arbitrary division into tribes. Proving a negative is impossible, so the evidence can be in the form of an unbroken chain of logic. The same applies to presenting evidence that removing racism is not limited to intentional means, and that racism is not structurally embedded in medicine.
The deputy editor appears to have claimed that socio-economic factors are more important than race in determining healthcare outcomes, and that is not acceptable to Woke, Inc. I agree that there is racism involved here, but do not find it on the side of the deputy editor. It clearly lies with Woke, Inc. That institution appears to pioritize proving its charge of ubiquitous structural racism over improving the lot of black America. If we agree that there are unequal outcomes, and we do, then limiting the search for causes to a single preferred narrative of the race war profiteers is racist. It denies that black America deserves a thorough investigation searching for causes of unequal outcomes. I find that abominable.
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The process whereby cause and effect are linked in science is to put a great deal of information into a pile and call it “correlation.” We already have a pile of information labeled “unsubstantiated assertions.” Both piles are likely to have clues about causation.We then collect information about outcomes (in this case, health care outcomes) and validate that Column B has worse outcomes than Column W. All of that is to get to the real work: compile data on various demographics of each group.Control for each and identify when the outcomes become the same. That has already been done repeatedly (there’s the scientific method, repeated running of the same or similar experiments and achieving the same or similar results) for incarceration and some other life outcomes.
There is a single variable for which, when corrected, the research yields near-identical outcomes: number of adults in the individual’s childhood home. Two is always better than one. Best results are received with one male and one female adult in the household, and that holds across all income and generational wealth groups. Reports of heroic single mothers of color raising some of the world’s greatest contributors to humanity are true; they are also outliers. Two same-sex parents beats one parent. Two never-married parents beats a single parent. Until just over ten years ago no university would allow the issue to be studied, claiming that asking the questions was in and of itself racist.
That is unconscionable.
Bill, I feel your pain. Is this the methodology highly trained experts would use to analyze ANY other complex issue? How about the effect of advertising on weight gain? Would someone simply declare the answer without analysis? Without clear definitions? Without parsing for confounding factors? This is about what one should expect when people’s livelihoods are threatened, however. You might have some heroes, but most people in the primes of their careers would rather hunker down, avoid saying anything potentially controversial and wait for retirement. Too bad that is a shitty way to approach public health.