Georgetown’s ‘Anti-Racist Physician’ Course Pushes Dubious Science on Med Students

The Georgetown University School of Medicine, alongside the National Anti-racism in Medicine Curriculum Coalition (NAMCC), developed a medical school elective course aimed at promoting “anti-racism” and tackling “anti-Blackness” in the medical field. 

The course, Core Competencies of an Anti-racist Physician, is promoted through the Association of American Medical Colleges’ (AAMC) educational resource journal, MedEdPortal.

“The course sought to advance students’ skills in recognizing how anti-Blackness may influence a clinical encounter and being able to explicitly name the entrenched nature of anti-Blackness in the culture and history of medicine writ large,” the course description in MedEdPortal states.

What does this look like in practice? Well, the course sends students through several activities that amount to either lessons on African American culture or DEI trainings, each with seemingly little pedagogical value pertaining to the practice of medicine.

“During this course, students viewed the documentary 13th and reflected on their results on the Implicit Association Test, as well as engaging in a required visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC,” the course description states.

It’s hard to see what a documentary about the incarceration of black Americans has to do with the competencies required to be a physician, or how a field trip to a museum is preparing students to better treat their future patients. These activities aren’t relevant to medical education except in the most attenuated sense, and surely Georgetown can find more useful courses to fill their students’ schedules.

But the more troubling aspect is the promotion of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) as a useful tool.

A 2013 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that IATs were “poor predictors” of real-world bias and discrimination, while the test has not been shown to correlate with other indicators of real-word discrimination.

In short, the course asks students to examine outcomes on a test of their racial biases that have very little real world application. This is, at best, a waste of time and resources, but more accurately a great way to engender paranoia and self-loathing among medical students.

Moreover, the assessment that accompanies the course, aimed at gauging students’ learning outcomes, is effectively a test of their adherence to DEI ideology. 

For instance, the assessment asked students to set a racial equity goal for themselves. These could include possible affirmations such as “I am planning to read more books by Black authors,” “I will interrupt or redirect racist hate speech in my personal or professional life,” and “I will take the [Implicit Association Test] to better understand my bias.”

But it doesn’t stop there; the assessment also asks students to rate how much they agree with the following statements: “Anti-Black racism is a problem in US healthcare systems,” “Racial minority patients are routinely treated differently in the hospital, especially black patients,” and “I understand the ways that race is falsely biologized in a clinical context,” along with many others.

A score of 5 is given when a student “strongly agrees” with the statement. The “correct” answers for all the previous questions are all 5s.

It’s concerning that a course like this is clogging up medical school curricula when there is already so much a prospective physician must learn. And it’s even more concerning that, should the course succeed in achieving its learning outcomes, students will come away worse off. 

Medical schools and educators should focus instead on preparing students for the actual practice of medicine, not inundating students with harmful and radical ideas in the misguided pursuit of “anti-racism.”