Much like law school, where classes in social justice have displaced such banal subjects as Evidence, med school has also succumbed to the lessons of the passionate. And we thought they were the smart kids because they could do math.

There have been a growing number of calls for doctors to make the fight against racism central to what they do. The American Board of Internal Medicine, for example, recently decried “structural, systemic and cultural racism.” Meanwhile, the American Academy of Pediatrics has implored its members to “dismantle racism at every level” of society.

Their logic is straightforward. Living in a racist society and being exposed to racist police violence is bad for the health of black Americans. Doctors should thus do three things: increase diversity within the medical profession, improve their understanding of the social determinants of health, and contend with broad social issues that impact health in a less direct manner.

The first two of these aims are laudable. But the third takes physicians into realms where they have no expertise—and thus risks eroding public trust in the medical profession.

This might be unfair, as there is no one who has expertise in the the final realm of concern since it exists only in the imagination of the woke. “Dismantling racism” isn’t an actual thing, but a slogan taken from the effort of Ibrim Kendi’s “anti-racism,” which calls for society to flip its discrimination against blacks to discrimination against whites as the only possible solution for anyone who wants to be anti-racism.

And then there’s the book on the Pathology class reading list.

With the activist imperative comes a new teaching paradigm. Stanford University School of Medicine, for example, has just published an “anti-racist” curriculum, which instructs students in “confronting white supremacy.” The University of California at San Francisco offers a “toolkit” for “anti-racism and race literacy,” which emphasizes “white privilege” and recommends Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. The Association of American Medical Colleges wants schools to administer “unconscious bias training”; Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has even signed an Executive Directive to develop rules that require implicit bias training for health professionals.

What could possibly go wrong with the person upon whom your life depends having been trained by Dr. DiAngelo (oh wait, she’s a marketer until Harvard gives her an honorary doctorate)?

The thesis of White Fragility is equally questionable. A key premise of DiAngelo’s book is that white people are both racist and cannot tolerate admitting that they are. Worse, no white person can present evidence to the contrary, since any attempt to do so would simply betray their unconscious determination to perpetuate white supremacy: “White fragility is not weakness per se,” she writes. “In fact, it is a powerful means of white racial control and the protection of white advantage.”

This idea has rightly been decried as unscientific. By asserting that a white person’s very denial of his or her racism constitutes proof of that racism, DiAngelo violates the fundamental scientific principle of falsifiability. Such an inept standard of evidence would be unacceptable in other medical school courses such as physiology, neuroscience and pathology; and yet, it is now in the ascendant at many medical schools.

Is there any reason a physician should be any less concerned or involved in eliminating racism in society than anyone else? I don’t see one, although like anyone else, this is both a personal choice as to how to do so rather than a professional dictate or medical necessity. By making it a requisite aspect of medicine, what would the real world consequences be?

Will an ER doc treat black patients first without regard to exigency to prove his virtue? Will the mother of a white child gushing blood screaming at the doc for taking a broken arm as her child bleeds out be caught on video and branded the newest “Karen”?

If a doctor fails to treat black people with the same degree of care and concern with which he would treat a white person, then he’s engaged in racism, which should be just as outrageous from a doc as a lawyer or, for that matter, anyone else. But that’s not what they’re being taught.

If a physician chooses to hand over the keys to his leased Porsche to an oppressed black person on 168th Street, that’s entirely up to him. But that’s a personal choice, not a subject to be aced in med school by the smart kids.