The Racial Assault on Medical Science and Public Health And its enablers in the I.R.S.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was not uncommon to hear progressives identify the distribution of the virus as “racist,” and to call for a species of reverse racism to remedy the offense. In the words of Ibram X. Kendi - one of the most influential, widely read and intellectually vapid spokesmen for this cause: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination….”[1] In medical practice this now means providing special resources and special care to black patients whose medical conditions are allegedly caused by white racism. It is also unconstitutional and a nullification of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which specifically outlaws systemic racism, even against white people.

It would be a relief to learn that this is a view confined to an academic fringe – and a mediocre one at that. But Ibram X. Kendi is not only a best-selling author and self-styled “anti-racist” advocate, he is also the head of a multi-million-dollar, tax-exempt, “anti-racism” institute at Boston University. Moreover, his racist remedies have taken root in America’s medical schools, hospitals, and professional associations and have become an integral policy of the American public health system.

The Equity in Health Movement I: The Ideology

In 2021, the Biden administration issued an instruction to Medicare physicians to “create and implement an anti-racism plan.” Issued as a final rule in the Federal Register last November, it states, “The plan should include a clinic-wide review of existing tools and policies, such as value statements or clinical practice guidelines, to ensure that they include and are aligned with a commitment to anti-racism and an understanding of race as a political and social construct, not a physiological one.”[2] Under this rule, doctors who create and implement an “anti-racism” plan and discriminate in favor of black patients will receive a financial bonus for doing so – in the form of higher reimbursements for their services.[3]

An even more prestigious proselytizer of this racial perspective is Lisa A. Cooper, MD, MPH ’93, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor and director of the Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity.[4] Cooper’s evidence for concluding that the coronavirus pandemic has a racist dimension,\ which is “structural,” is the shared view of the entire progressive effort to politicize the medical profession. It is the product of Critical Race Theory and other Cultural Marxist ideas, whose “structures” erase individuals and their choices in favor of ideological categories, which allegedly lead to disparities in outcomes between different racial and gender categories. But as Thomas Sowell has pointed out, there are disparities in the achievements and outcomes of all racial and ethnic groups globally, which have nothing to do with racism.[5]

Thus, the faux evidence for COVID-19 having “racist” effects is that it impacts black Americans disproportionately to their representation in the general population. In the words of the Johns Hopkins magazine that interviewed Lisa Cooper: “Nationally, African American deaths are nearly two times greater than would be expected based on their share of the population, according to The COVID Racial Data Tracker.”[6] Q.E.D.

But why is that? According to the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity, Lisa Cooper: “Before COVID-19, minority communities were already disproportionately impacted by health inequities. People in those communities already have higher rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and lung disease, so these are the folks who were actually going to be at more risk of getting seriously ill with COVID-19. These health inequities result from the financial stresses of being poor and the social stresses of being from a marginalized group with a history of institutionalized, sanctioned mistreatment by law enforcement and other societal institutions. There’s a confluence of all these different factors—not having access to food, not having access to good quality housing, being crowded in small houses where there are multiple generations and unable to engage in social distancing or stock up on groceries for several weeks at a time, having to use public transportation, to work in essential jobs, and having less access to health care. These are all manifestations of structural racism.”[7]

There are so many false statements and misrepresentations in these sentences, it is hard to know where to begin. In the first place it is an insult to black Americans (even though Cooper herself is black) to describe black America as living in inner city poverty, beset by the unhealthy conditions associated with that status. In fact, more than eighty-percent of American blacks are living above the poverty line and the majority are comfortably middle class.[8] If eighty percent of blacks live like other Americans of all colors, how can racism be an explanation for the plight of...

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