AAMC Webinar Instructs Pediatricians to be ‘Antiracist’ Activists

The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), undeterred by the deluge of media coverage exposing its radical activism and the recent executive actions targeting DEI, hosted a webinar last week on pediatrician competencies that included a lengthy discussion on anti-racist activism.

The webinar, titled Competency-Based Medical Education: A Framework for Advancing Equity for our Learners and Our Patients, featured discussions on how the “competency-based” approach to medical education can be used to drive “equity” in the medical field.

The speakers included the Vice President of Competency-Based Medical Education at the American Board of Pediatrics, Dr. David Turner, and the webinar specifically focused on how pediatricians can work to advance equity. 

One speaker, Dr. Patricia Poitevien, referenced a slide explaining that a critical “function” of a pediatrician was “dismantling processes/systems rooted in racism and/or discrimination thereby eliminating inequities and achieving optimal health outcomes for all children.” A key curricular component of medical education assessing that function requires pediatricians to “promote[] antiracism and work[] to eliminate the impact of all forms of racism on health outcomes.”

“What skills would they be able to demonstrate? What behaviors would they have to participate in? Which behaviors would we have to assess in a critical learning environment to say ‘yes, you are entrustable in actually doing this function and becoming a pediatrician,’” Poitevien said, referring to assessing a pediatrician’s competencies regarding “antiracism.”

The claim here, that a pediatrician must “promote antiracism” to properly function as a pediatrician, is absurd and disturbing. 

Antiracism is a divisive and harmful ideology that explicitly endorses racial discrimination as a tool to right past wrongs. The goal of antiracism is to achieve equity by disadvantaging certain racial groups and preferencing others. As its most prominent advocate Ibram X. Kendi has said: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

In essence, the webinar’s takeaway is that pediatricians must be trained to promote this toxic worldview in order to properly live up to their station.

The context of the webinar is critical: One of the AAMC’s larger focus areas is Competency-Based Medical Education (CBME), an educational framework that assesses students, physicians, and other learners on performance outcomes across several core “competencies.”

In particular, the AAMC is working on a joint initiative with the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine (AACOM), and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) called the Foundational Competencies for Undergraduate Education; the AAMC report on the Foundational Competencies for Undergraduate Education lists six core competencies.

Additionally, the webinar is part of the AAMC’s IDEAS educational series, which stands for “Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, [and] Anti-racism” and features presentations and courses intended to advance DEI in medicine. According to the IDEAS homepage, “improving inclusion, diversity, equity, and anti-racism is a critical priority for the academic medicine community.”

In another IDEAS webinar, the AAMC pushed to “institutionalize” DEI among all the major organizations in medical education.

Unfortunately, this institutional commitment to DEI and racially discriminatory ideology on the part of the AAMC is nothing new; Do No Harm exposed the AAMC’s wholesale embrace of radical identity politics in our landmark report in December. The report exposed how the AAMC has embedded DEI into every facet of medical education, and sparked a wave of negative media attention and investigation into the AAMC’s practices.

It seems that, despite the backlash to its radical activism, the AAMC has learned nothing.