As the podcast has been taken down, I can’t listen to it (even if I were inclined to) to determine whether it was as bad (read “traumatic”) as claimed. In its place is the apologia.
This is Dr Howard Bauchner, Editor in Chief of JAMA and the JAMA Network.
The podcast on structural racism based on the discussion between Dr Ed Livingston and Dr Mitch Katz has been withdrawn. Comments made in the podcast were inaccurate, offensive, hurtful, and inconsistent with the standards of JAMA. Racism and structural racism exist in the U.S. and in healthcare. After careful consideration, I determined that the harms caused by the podcast outweighed any reason for the podcast to remain available on the JAMA Network. I once again apologize for the harms caused by this podcast and the tweet about the podcast. We are instituting changes that will address and prevent such failures from happening again.
JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, is kind of a big deal, which makes what it says, and what it doesn’t say, a big deal. What did it say to cause such an apology?
Well, that’s a rather provocative claim, that no physician is racist. It’s unsurprising that it was not taken well.
The activists are going after JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association-since 1883).
To understand what it is really about, just read Dr. Marya's tweet:
"An apology is not enough. I want a change in who sets the narrative and agenda". pic.twitter.com/gRBivSapwA
— Amanda (@AmandaLuvsRoses) March 8, 2021
There were two possible ways to address this extremely controversial issue. One was to provide rational argument as to why it was wrong. The other was the reaction it received.
Some more early responses:
"Literally sick to my stomach"
"I didn't listen b/c honestly didn't want to be traumatized by the content" pic.twitter.com/IbCV8tbhsU
— Amanda (@AmandaLuvsRoses) March 8, 2021
And if course, this demanded blood be shed and a human sacrifice.
It may be that the content of the podcast was flagrantly racist. It may be that the content of the podcast wasn’t racist at all, despite the controversial twit. But when it comes to matters of medicine, science if you will, should it be constrained only to that which is, as is currently politically correct, “anti-racist”?
It’s hard to imagine, though certainly not impossible, that the content of the podcast was facially racist. Did they contend that black people are inferior, or that they were unworthy of the same medical care as white people? Was it argued that no white physician harbored bias against black people? Without hearing what was said, it’s impossible to say for sure. But this isn’t likely.
On the other hand, is there any area of knowledge where ideological limits are more dangerous than medicine? Yet, that, apparently, is what is now demanded of JAMA, and what JAMA apparently intends to do, to constrain science to align with ideology rather than the other way around. Anyone who truly cares about human beings and their health and welfare should insist that science not lie to itself, either for or against ideology, in ascertaining the best health care regardless of race or gender.
Is it really in the best interest of black people that JAMA, that the medical community, express no medical idea that conflicts with ideology no matter where the science takes them? Is health, even survival, secondary to feelings of offense at the possibility that medical science and ideology might part ways as the facts require? This isn’t progress. This is sacrificing black lives on the altar of the woke, and one would hope that docs, of all people, would adhere to the Hippocratic oath to “first, do no harm.”
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So when black men start dropping dead because it’s racist to state that black men have higher incidences of heart disease and treat them accordingly that will be ok because it’s “anti-racist”? Or that blacks have a higher probability of sickle cell disease.
What a great new world they are creating, hope the grand-kids will love living in it.
Yes, I’d like to hear the podcast to know if the first line in the tweet was sincere or sarcastic (non-literal speech being the most difficult communicative mode to comprehend). And, while I appreciate that Scott is using this example as another means of swatting the woke, it’s well-established that racism in medicine didn’t spring full-blown from the head of some woke Zeus.
There is much, all-too-recent U.S. history of racism in medicine, which includes (but is not limited to) the Tuskegee Study, which lasted until 1972 and which, in addition to allowing the infected men die terrible deaths, let these men to infect others who had no idea of their exposure to syphilis. There also is plenty of empirical, peer-reviewed research going back 30 years (if not longer) that demonstrates that socioeconomic differences alone do not account for adverse health outcomes among non-Anglo populations as compared to their Anglo counterparts.
It’s a lot of fun to make fun of the woke, isn’t it? It’s more difficult to confront our history and determine how we move forward as a result of that history.
We hear about the Tuskegee study a lot lately, even though we had recognized it, condemned it and swore never to let it happen again a generation ago. Reminds me a lot of the ACLU living off its legacy of Skokie, even though it would never happen today. But when you only have one nail, you keep pounding on it, over and over, and over.
If you’re going to be an apologist for black people, at least try not to make us look stupid by pulling out Tuskegee. We’ve been going to doctors for years since then. We’re past it.
“You went full structural, man. Never go full structural.”
I am convinced that being woke means acting like a screeching monkey throwing feces at ideas and things you don’t like.
Part of the point of making it completely unavailable to the public is so there’s no evidence to weigh the charges against. We have accusations, an apology, and nothing else. Supposedly he denied the existence or even just the severity of structural racism, suggesting that there are factors other than a racially prejudiced environment that lead to the existence of differential health outcomes, which, if you’re woke, is going to be understood as blaming the victim and basically Klan speak.
But without the podcast, we have nothing to judge.
Nothing proves racism more than denying racism per CRT.
You can find the podcast on the Wayback machine of the web archive. I don’t think the tweet was a very good summary. A better one would be “Even assuming doctors are not individually racist, structural racism can exist.” That was the main argument of the doctor who was interviewed. I might have missed it, but I don’t think the tweet is a direct quote found anywhere in the interview, but once again you can check for yourself on the internet archive.
However, the interviewer does have a monologue at the end of the interview where he questions whether naming current disparities “structural racism” is a good idea. I would conjecture that would be enough to get a number of activists up in arms.
So the most offensive aspect was the hyperbolic twit, and the podcast was only secondarily racist because it questioned the (characterization? existence?) of meaningless though beloved phrase “structural racism”? Well then, if that’s not worth the demise of non-ideological medical science, I don’t know what is?
Is saying that “no physician is racist” any more offensive than saying “all white people are racist”?
In a rational objective world, no. In a rational, objective world both of those statements are obviously incorrect. Until the “woke” clean up their own racism problem they shouldn’t be taken seriously when they complain about racism.
Can a racist ever clean up his racism? If not, the woke have a built-in excuse for failure, as success is impossible.
I have to imagine the “no physician is racist” line was PR gone wrong, because can you imagine if they’d said that there are some racist physicians? The members of the AMA would be mad (“are you saying some of us doctors are racist? Why don’t you name names then?”) and plenty of regular people, including potential regulators, would be mad as well (“why is the AMA letting doctors be racist? People like that shouldn’t even have a license, they’re literally killing black bodies! We need more monitoring and oversight of med students and doctor’s personal lives”), so “no physician is racist” seemed like the safer bet; but it was a lose-lose proposition either way.
So you say the wrong word in the surgery and your Doctor suffers a trauma so severe he can’t treat the trauma you’re in there for… He goes off to get counseling and you get sued for saying something disliked.
Going to the doctor has always been a gamble in the modern world.
Some propositions about racism:-
1/ Racism and other prejudicial ~isms constitute normal human behaviour and all involve the same mechanisms of individual psychology, collective psychology and collective social action. It is normal for each human mind to to have a distinction between GOOD and BAD lifeforms or US and THEM, lifeforms that are beneficial to us and and lifeforms that are noxious to us. The GOOD category includes cats, dogs, sheep, barley, cabbages, fruit trees wheat……… the BAD includes weeds vermin such as feral pigs, foxes,rabbits, wolves…….. Humans also are divided into these two categories. If another human is different from people like us it is normal to consider him at least suspicious and at worst an agent of Satan.
2/ Many people react strongly to suggestions that they are in some way racist and respond with indignant fury as in some of the tweets SHG included. My take from the tweets is that they were responding not to a statement that doctors are not racist but the implication that the opposite may be true. Such indignation is not feigned but it reminds me of Shakespeare’s phrase “doth protest to much”.
3/ The concept of “racism” cannot be described by one or two words like “racist” and “racism”. A whole subsidiary vocabulary is required. There are different flavours of racism and racists and all are not are equally damaging in all situations. For example the racism of 2 men who kill a black man by towing him behind a light truck is different from that of the men’s neighbours who think that blacks are a waste of space and oxygen but should not be murdered but whom the two men would have assumed would have approved their actions.
4/ Racist beliefs do not reside in a section of the brain labelled “Irrational prejudicial beliefs that noone should ever entertain” but in a section called “obvious truths that only silly people question” and to which we refer by the phrase “Common Sense”.
5/ There are many minorities that do now suffer or have in the past suffered from racism but not all racisms are equally damaging. Each wave of non-Anglo immigrants to the US, Irish, German, Nordic, Italian Chinese, Korean, Malaysian have initially suffered discrimination (eg No Irish may Apply”) but the Europeans have eventually been accepted as White, that is European and the East Asians as model minorities held up before Blacks to highlight the deficiencies of the “tailspin of dysfunction” in their communities. Also these immigrants were literate in their own languages and had their own civilized culture could adapt to English language and US White culture while many “freed” slaves were illiterate as slave owners preferred to keep them that way as a literate slave is dangerously uppity. Also anyunifying culture giving strength and resiliance was discouraged if not beaten out of them.
6/ The damage done by racism depends on the intensity of the racism the duration over which it applied and the strength of the power imbalance between the discriminators and discriminated. Black Americans score highest on all of these factors.
7/ SHG, can you name a date after which the US stopped beating up on Black nominal citizens?
Is there some reason you thought this was the perfect opportunity for you to use my bandwidth to post your personal random polemic about race?
SHG, not random thoughts but thoughts triggered by the WOKE/ANTI-WOKE argument that seems to be behind the JAMA podcast controversy.
It is not absolutely clear to me but my impression is that the fuss is not WOKE snowflake politically correct chattering class leftists infuriated by the suggestion that US medicos are not racist but indignant opponents of the politically correct evil of HUMAN RIGHTS. incensed by the WOKENESS implied by the pod cast.
Since the pod cast has been withdrawn no one can examine it now to confirm whether the fuss was justified and the cringing apology by JAMA is very sad.
The consensus of commentators on your blog seems to be that Black Americans do protest too much, and that the squalor of the black underclass is entirely the result of their appalling character defects and the US owes them nothing until they take firm grasp of their bootstraps and levitate socially upwards to join real humans.
In my view WOKENESS is a response to abuse of human rights but it goes to far into the fields of absurdity. ANTI-WOKENESS is a backlash to human rights going too far and being allocated to members of species homo sapiens sapiens who are not human in the sense of being entitled to human rights. These may constitute as much as 95% of the homo saps on Earth. For example Berta Cacerea rightfully whacked by agents of the Honduran oligarchy for impeding progress that will enrich members of the oligarchy, all Muslims and all Palestinians who are in the way of the Jews making a state in which they are safe from murder by Christians.
The assertions about racism are things that I believe you and your commentators need to know but to which they are resistant.
I visit your blog often but only post if something resonates with thoughts that I already have so my previous post may have seemed to be off topic but it is something that I have felt the need to tell you and your commentators for some time.
Regards.
I am sincerely trying to understand your point, but to be frank, it’s neither clear nor easy. You seem to gloss over a theme here, that there is a liberal view of racial equality that is decidedly anti-woke because of its authoritarianism and irrationality. Yet it very much concerns itself with human rights and racial equality, but not by indulging in fantasy.
I don’t think anyone here believes “the squalor of the black underclass is entirely the result of their appalling character defects,” but that the eradicating external discrimination isn’t enough. Black people, and every other color and gender, have to be part of their own solution if they want to achieve success. It’s not one or the other, but everyone pulling together, and black people are as much a part of “everyone” as white people.
There is certainly a culture war going on between those who consider themselves WOKE and those who consider themselves Anti-Woke. The proposition advanced by both sides extend into absurdity.
My original post was prompted by the JAMA pod cast issue but I diverged off topic so will return to the JAMA issue.
On this I am not clear as to who was so upset by it. Was there a flood of complaints from the woke about the atrocity of asserting that US doctors are not racist or were the complaints from the anti-woke against the suggestion that the podcast content may have implied that the US medical system channels anti-black racism or were there complaints from both sides? No one should be surprised when social systems channel racism. If racism exists it gets channeled and magnified by social systems such as law or medicine that are implemented by actions of many people actinq in sequence. One does not need to assume conscious racist malice by doctors. Most racist beliefs exist as malign stereotypes in the unconscious of many people. To answer this question one needs access to the podcast as well as the commentary it stimulated. I avoid private information suckholes like facebook and twitter so do not have access to the social media commentary. I only see tweets when a blogger like you includes them in a post and on your blog they are very hard to read but the impression I get from those you included is that it is the anti-woke who are most upset.
I am appalled that JAMA were so spooked at the reaction to the podcast regardless of who was complaining that they issued a cringing apology and removed it. As Jonathan Turley says in post after post on his blog there is a burgening movement worldwide against free speech for fear of offending those who are too easily offended..
The tweets you reproduced were difficult to read because they seemed to be in too small a typeface but the impression I got from them is that they were not from woke snowflake types but from the antiwoke. I would never use the term “liberal” in speaking of the antiwoke
The term WOKE has replaced the term politically correct as a way of heaping scorn on people who treat humans not entitled to human rights as so entitled.
There are many people who become extremely angry when human rights go to people who do not deserve them and for whom they are too good such as dark skinned people, the indigenous and Palestinians. This disturbs me and I believe I detect this in posts and comment on your blog. In including thoughts prompted by other blog posts of yours or comments on them. they may seem off topic.
The propositions about racism are my attempts to explain where most people misunderstand it. I consider myself racist and harbouring other prejudices against various innocent groups of homo sapiens. I do not consider that calling someone racist is a dreadful slur on his character as racism is practically universal. However trying to get people to think clearly about it is a good idea.
About the failings of the black underclass. Yes improvement of their situation involves action by blacks themselves but the question is is improvement possible from where they start? The uinderclass is a very hostile environment which destroys good character or never allows it to arise in the first place. Good character in a member of the black underclass does not prevent them being stopped when walking or driving while black. When police engage in army of occupation policing of places where blacks live it is not to protect them but to find prosecutable crimes to fullfill arrest quotas. Members of the underclass do not have the protection of the law nor do they have protection from it. Just as after reconstruction ended Southern whites introduced laws to selectively define Blacks as criminals the Nixon & Regan introduced laws against the normal human behaviour of using mind altering chemicals. As H R Halderman has been quoted, the administration had two sets of enemies, the hippies and the blacks and illegal marijuana allowed them to persecute hippy opponents and heroin the blacks.
People use drugs for many reasons, some because they enjoy the altered state which is harmless others because their normal states of consciousness is unbearable and they use illicit substances as anti-depressants not having access to psychiatrists who can give them scripts for Prozac and in any case ordinary antidepressants are not strong enough. Drug crime is substantially a result of being in an underclass but authority uses it as a means to wreck their lives.
The drug laws provide so much discretion that allows racially skewed enforcement. It also allows authority to justify racism in other social areas. These people use drugs therefore they are criminals and therefore do not deserve to have taxpayers’ money spent on them in a way that benefits the such as education, the protection of the law or welfare..
Regards.
I’ve apparently given you the mis-impression that I was interested in reading another million words. My apologies.
Sometimes, you are tolerant to a fault. The least you could do is warn the rest of us.