DEI jackboots would have had Richard Slayman die

 I just had to click when I saw the title of Heather MacDonald's latest piece for City Journal: ""Kidneys Don't See Color."

I've seen a fair amount of coverage of DEI encroachment on hard sciences, and I know the diversity racket is MacDonalds's beat, so I had an inkling that this would be about medicine - probably surgery. 

That was indeed the case. MacDonald, after introducing Slayman, the recent recipient of a genetically modified pig kidney that allowed him to get off dialysis, gives an impressively thorough account of the history of surgical transplants. I recommend it. It's a very interesting tale of various developments over the last century-plus.

So what's not to like about Mr. Slayman's story?

According to STEM diversity dogma, however, none of this should have happened. Slayman is black; his transplant surgeons were not. The scientists who pioneered the biological and surgical advances that made the transplant possible were also nonblack. Worse, before the mid-twentieth century, those pathbreaking scientists were overwhelmingly white.

These demographic facts mean, according to today’s medical establishment, that Slayman was at significant risk of receiving substandard care from a medical and scientific enterprise that is racist to its core.

According to the National Academies of Science, America’s most prestigious science honor society, “systemic racism in the United States both historically and in modern-day society” produces “systematically inequitable opportunities and outcomes” in medicine. Such medical racism privileges white patients and white doctors, explains the National Academies of Science, and is “perpetuated by gatekeepers through stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination.” The Journal of the National Cancer Instituteand its sister publication, Journal of the National Cancer Institute Spectrum, blasts the “systemic and institutional racism within health care” responsible for “inequities” in medical outcomes.

The best way to guard against such inequities, according to the STEM establishment, is to color-match patients and doctors. Similarly, the best way to advance science is to select scientists on identity grounds. The National Institutes of Health, which funds biological research, argues that a “diverse” scientific workforce will be better at “fostering scientific innovation, enhancing global competitiveness, [and] improving the quality of research” than one chosen without regard to racial characteristics. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, another federal funder, seeks scientists of the right color to “develop a highly competent and diverse scientific workforce capable of conducting state-of-the-art research in NIAID mission areas.” It is a given, per the National Academies of Science, that “increasing the number of Black men and Black women who enter the fields of science, engineering, and medicine will benefit the social and economic health of the nation.”

Slayman’s transplant surgeons—Leonardo Riella, Tatsuo Kawai, and Nahel Elias—came from non-European, non-white countries: Brazil, Japan, and Syria. Don’t think that those surgeons count as “diverse,” however. In the scientific establishment, as in all of academia, diversity at its core refers to blacks, with the other “underrepresented” minorities—American Hispanics and Native Americans—occasionally thrown in for good measure. When medical associations, medical schools, and federal agencies conduct diversity tallies (which they do obsessively), their primary concern is the proportion of blacks in medical education and practice. The American Medical Association’s chief academic officer, Sanjay Desai, is scandalized that “only” 5.7 percent of doctors identify as black, though blacks make up over 13 percent of the population. The American Society of Clinical Oncology’s March 23 bulletin complains that only 3 percent of practicing oncologists identify as black. By contrast, nearly 90 percent of hospital leadership “self-identify as White,” according to doctor Manali Patel. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases sees a crisis for medical science in the fact that “only” 7.3 percent of full-time medical faculty come from “underrepresented backgrounds,” though those “underrepresented backgrounds” constitute 33 percent of the national population.

The team leader in the Slayman transplant, Riella, directs a kidney transplantation research lab at Mass General. Its members look like a United Nations gathering, with researchers from Turkey, Lebanon, China, Spain, Japan, and other non-U.S. countries. Though white Americans are a small minority in the Riella Laboratory, it would not count as “diverse” for purposes of science funding or political legitimacy, because it has no blacks in it. We are to believe that this absence of blacks comes from white supremacist machinations, though those backstage white supremacists didn’t do a very good job of maintaining numerical advantage in the lab. And without blacks, the Riella Laboratory has never functioned at the highest levels of scientific achievement, according to diversity thinking.

Slayman may have had a positive outcome this time, despite being treated by nonblack transplant surgeons, but other black kidney patients have no guarantee that they will be as lucky in the future. In early April, the New York Times wrote about new techniques for keeping donated organs functioning outside of a body before transplant, a process known as perfusion. The transplant doctors whom the paper quoted—Daniel Borja-Cacho (originally from Colombia), Shimul Shah, Shafique Keshavjee, and Ashish Vinaychandra Shah—also don’t resemble the members roster of a Greenwich, Connecticut, country club, circa 1955. The Times undoubtedly tried to find a black source. Its inability to do so reflects a medical ecosystem that, according to the establishment, lacks diversity and, as such, puts black lives at risk.

This is the kind of jettisoning of not just compassion and medical ethics but basic common sense that has led to puberty blockers and teenage mastectomies.

Kudos to MacDonald for bringing this to our attention, but I think you know what LITD thinks the diversity jackboots who had a problem with this remarkable step forward deserve..