The wave of identity politics invading every nook and cranny of public life came so swiftly that many average people refused to see it. Denial led many to view workplace and media obsessions over “white privilege” and permanent underclass status for black people as a passing fad, a quirky but harmless political obsession of obscure academics. It has taken the ideological hijacking of their children to jar them into reality. But now that parents around the country have seen what amounts to doctrinaire child abuse in the classroom, they are fully awake and taking corrective action.
As the Virginia election upset of liberal Democrats showed last week, the public is rebelling against the woke juggernaut in their public schools. What seemed to turn the tide of opinion in that blue state was Democratic candidate for governor Terry McAuliffe telling parents that what the schools teach their children is none of their business.
The next logical focus of an enraged public should be upstream, to the source of the poison: America’s higher education establishment. And because of the unique power they wield over their students and staff, professional schools have become ever more insulated, more extreme, and more dangerous in their pursuit of forcing the submission of everyone in their sphere to the cult of identity.
To understand how identity politics made the short jump from universities to medical societies, consider a typical specialty society, the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery. Scholarly panels at the academy’s semiannual conventions have included, as only one example, a presentation on so-called microaggressions. Speakers in this nearly hourlong session schooled their audience of highly trained surgical specialists in the insidious nature of these manufactured insults: Microaggressions contain “hidden messages” couched in “not what the person is actually saying, but what they’re not saying.” Hidden insults are conveyed even through such subtle signals as eye contact, one speaker explains. The academy’s podcast on unconscious bias sets the rules for correcting doctors’ behavior around people of different backgrounds by claiming everyone harbors unconscious racist bias.
Young doctors in training at the Medical College of Wisconsin learn that to be white is to be racist even before they learn the names of the cranial nerves. The campus publication Transformational Times prods students to learn how to get ahead at MCW with performative displays of self-abasement: “I Am White and I Have Been Complacent,” in which a medical student confesses she has “failed to address systemic racism” and that she “would like to acknowledge my cowardice in this, to apologize.” The similarity to Maoist university student struggle sessions is clear, and it is no coincidence.
An even more ominous development comes from California, which by law already requires compulsory implicit bias indoctrination in doctors’ continuing education, a condition of licensure. In an Aug. 23 letter to the state’s hospitals, clinics, and birthing centers, California Attorney General Rob Bonta demanded a list of perinatal healthcare providers who had taken implicit racial bias training — and a list of those who had not. The letter includes a pro forma scolding about implicit racial bias, by now an obligatory feature in such edicts, citing racial differences in maternal deaths as evidence. The official state message is that the doctors, nurses, and midwives who devote their professional lives to helping women through the most consequential time of their lives are closet racists in need of reprogramming by the state.
The California government’s Orwellian burrowing into the brains of doctors and nurses is a colossal step down the road to woke totalitarianism. It should be the wake-up call to health professionals that McAuliffe’s scornful dismissal was to parents of Virginian school children. The state holds the power of licensure, which is the power of professional life and death over health professionals. History warns that this idea won’t remain confined to California.
Virginian voters soundly rejected the idea of turning their children over to public school commissars for race indoctrination. People everywhere are likely to be just as repulsed at the idea of their doctors viewing them with a racial agenda in mind.
Timothy Wheeler is a retired surgeon living in Southern California.
