University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Hosts Political Activists, Advocates of Critical Race Theory

During its 47th Annual Refresher Course in Family Medicine, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center hosted a March 6 session, titled “Racial Health Disparities” and presented by Stephanie Miller, MD and Kristina Johnson, MD.

The session was replete with political advocacy and references to DEI, critical race theory, and implicit bias.

For instance, Johnson spent a significant portion of the discussion going on a diatribe against the public health policies of the Trump administration.

“There is an ongoing attempt at erasure of trans people. There are outright attacks on gender affirming care,” Johnson said. “Immigration and Customs Enforcement has ended its policy of staying out of healthcare facilities, and the Department of Education may be cutting financial support for students with disabilities. As physicians, we must speak up. Use your voice.”

Without delving too deeply into the political nature of these attacks, it’s worth noting that the Trump administration’s actions regarding so-called “gender-affirming care” have only been to restrict federal funding of such interventions for children. 

Moreover, in addition to citing founder of critical race theory Richard Delgado, Miller called for healthcare professionals to engage in active anti-racism, using an example of a moving walkway at an airport. 

“Actively racist behavior is equivalent to walking fast on the conveyor belt. Passive racist behavior is equivalent to standing still on the walkway. No overt effort is being made, but the conveyor belt moves the bystanders along to the same destination as those who are actively walking. Some of the bystanders may feel the motion of the conveyor belt, see the active racists ahead of them, and choose to turn around; but unless they are walking actively in the opposite direction at a speed faster than the conveyor belt, unless they are actively anti-racist, they will find themselves carried along with others.” 

Anti-racism in practice often holds that racial discrimination is praiseworthy and necessary. It seeks to overcome different outcomes among racial and gender groups by actively discriminating in favor of some people and against others. Its most famous advocate, Ibram X. Kendi, made his embrace of racial discrimination explicit: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

At another point in the discussion, Miller talked about how to practice this ideological form of medicine in practice.

“You can provide gender-affirming care by confirming that you’re using your patients’ or your colleagues’ correct names and pronouns,” Miller said. “You can use ancestry rather than race to describe the risk of disease.”

Additionally, at various points in the discussion, both Miller and Johnson dismissed the idea that health disparities between racial groups could be explained by physical/genetic differences. 

Johnson summarizes her point succinctly here:

“We have talked about how the social construct of race was used by white people to gain and hold onto power, and how that resulted in health disparities between races; and the false conclusion that those disparities are based in genetics rather than racism. We’ve also explained that racism is anything that increases the disparity between racial groups, whether that’s intentional or not; and we use this narrow focus because the historical path and present-day disparities are so glaringly obvious.”

This is misleading. For instance, as our own Director of Research Ian Kingsbury has shown using the example of preeclampsia, in which about 55 percent of risk is estimated to be genetic, “West African ancestry is linked to risk variants in a gene called alipoprotein L1 (APOL1) that dramatically increase the likelihood of developing preeclampsia or kidney disease.” Genetic differences obviously play a role in numerous other conditions.

In other words, genetic differences between different groups of people obviously lead to differences in particular health outcomes, and it is dangerous to dismiss this fact.