Abstract
Medical academics are increasingly bringing critical race theory (CRT) or its corollaries to their discourse, to their curricula, and to their analyses of health and medical treatment disparities. The author argues that this is an error. The author considers the history of CRT, its claims, and its current presence in the medical literature. He contends that CRT is inimical to usual academic modes of inquiry and has obscured rather than aided the analysis of social and medical treatment disparities. Remedies for racism suggested by CRT advocates will not work and some of them will make things worse. Academic medicine should avoid the embrace of CRT and should maintain an allegiance to rigorous empirical inquiry and to treating patients not as essentialized ethnic group members but as individual human beings in need of care.
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Notes
In the rest of this article I shall use “anti-racism” for the traditional understanding and “antiracism” for the critical race theory concept, both without quotation marks.
Fryer’s study found no increased likelihood that police use deadly force against blacks compared to whites, when relevant variables were accounted for. Fryer’s study does not conclusively settle the question of police discrimination in the use of deadly force; it has been cogently criticized—see the discussion by O’Flaherty and Sethi (2021). It remains, however, one of the best if not the best study on this issue to date.
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Huddle, T.S. Against the Turn to Critical Race Theory and “Anti-racism” in Academic Medicine. HEC Forum 35, 337–356 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10730-022-09471-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10730-022-09471-1