AAMC president on diversity

[sunflower79]

Just curious to see what you think. Does he make a strong case for AA?
For those interested, you can also look at an article on AA that came out in jama this past march (?)

Washington, D.C., April 29, 2003 - Association of American Medical
Colleges (AAMC) President Jordan J. Cohen, M.D., issued the following
statement at today's Health Care Access Rally on Capitol Hill:

"On behalf of the Association of American Medical Colleges, whose
primary mission is the health of the nation through the advancement of
medical schools and teaching hospitals, I want to thank the
Congressional Black Caucus, Hispanic Caucus, Native American Caucus, and
Asian and Pacific American Caucus for the opportunity to speak at this
rally today.

Making sure that ALL Americans have access to a responsive health care
system with no disparities in treatment or outcomes is a goal the AAMC
has long been committed to, and I want to commend Representatives
Christian-Christensen, Honda, Pallone, and Solis, who are working so
hard to achieve this result.

We are all aware of how disparity in health care can cause suffering on
many levels. It seriously disrupts the lives of individuals, and impacts
our nation in broader social and economic terms.

We also know that there is no single approach or solution capable of
transforming our current health care system into one that is inclusive
and equitable. As indicated by this event's core principles,
establishing appropriate access requires a concerted multi-prong effort
to address such issues as insurance, distribution of health care
services, culturally competent care and more.

As a medical educator dedicated to achieving the objectives expressed
by the core principles, I'd like to focus my remarks today on what I
believe is a crucial element for this transformation-that is, creating a
diverse health professions workforce. Here are four reasons why:

First, diversity helps increase access to medical care and can improve
health outcomes. In medicine, for example, numerous studies demonstrate
that minority physicians are more likely than their non-minority
counterparts to serve minority populations. Moreover, empirical evidence
suggests that minority patients are more reluctant to accept physician
recommendations or seek medical care. However, when given the choice,
these patients tend to choose, and be more satisfied with, physicians of
their own race and background. In turn, research indicates that
increasing the level of satisfaction of minority patients with their
physicians increases the likelihood that they will seek preventive care,
follow a physician's recommendations, and continue with necessary
treatment.

Second, diversity can expand knowledge, skills, and attitudes of health
professionals. Diversity in the classroom helps students, who are our
future health care providers, understand how culturally determined
factors affect health. And a cadre of "culturally competent" health
professionals that reflect the nation's demography will translate into a
workforce that can more effectively treat people from a wide range of
cultural and ethnic backgrounds.

Third, diversity is needed to broaden the nation's medical research
agenda. Many unsolved health problems disproportionately affect minority
populations. Diversity in the research workforce can strengthen the
nation's health care agenda by investigating these problems, because
what individuals take an interest in depends to a great extent on their
personal cultural and ethnic filters.

Finally, diversity can improve health care services and positively
affect public policy. As is the case for virtually all sectors of the
U.S. economy, it is simply smart business for health care organizations
to draw their leadership from a richly diverse talent pool that mirrors
the racial and ethnic makeup of the nation. Similarly, policymakers who
reflect the diversity of the nation will create policies that can avoid
disparities.

The health of our nation depends on diversity within the health care
workforce. The AAMC is deeply dedicated to accomplishing this goal by
increasing diversity among medical students, medical school faculty,
practicing physicians, researchers, health care administrators, and
policymakers.

We look forward to working with Congress and other partners to rid our
health care system of all disparities and ensure that everyone has
access to the care they need."

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[vivekap2007]

WHITE PRIVILEGE: UNPACKING THE INVISIBLE KNAPSACK
by Peggy McIntosh (Associate Director, Wellesley College Center for Research on Women)
Through work to bring materials from women's studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed men's unwillingness to grant that they are over privileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to improve women's status, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can't or won't support the idea of lessening men's. Denials that amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages that men gain from women's disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened, or ended.
Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of white privilege that was similarly denied and protected. As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.
I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.
Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in women's studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about having white privilege must ask, "Having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?"
After I realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged privilege, I understood that much of their oppressiveness was unconscious. Then I remembered the frequent charges from women of color that white women whom they encounter are oppressive. I began to understand why we are justly seen as oppressive, even when we don't see ourselves that way. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence.
My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will. My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow "them" to be more like "us."
Daily effects of white privilege
I decided to try to work on myself at least by identifying some of the daily effects of white privilege in my life. I have chosen those conditions that I think in my case attach somewhat more to skin-color privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographic location, though of course all these other factors are intricately intertwined. As far as I can tell, my African American coworkers, friends, and acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent contact in this particular time, place, and line of work cannot count on most of these conditions.
1. I can, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.
2. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area that I can afford and in which I would want to live.
3. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.
4. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
5. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.
6. When I am told about our national heritage or about "civilization," I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.
7. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.
8. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.
9. I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods that fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser's shop and find someone who can deal with my hair.
10. Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.
11. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.
12. I can swear, or dress in second-hand clothes, or not answer letters without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.
13. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.
14. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.
15. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
16. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color, who constitute the world's majority, without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.
17. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider. 18. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to "the person in charge" I will be facing a person of my race.
19. If a traffic cop pulls me over, or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven't been singled out because of my race.
20. I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children's magazines featuring people of my race.
21. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in rather than isolated, out of place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, or feared.
22. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having coworkers on the job suspect that I got it because of race.
23. I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen.
24. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help my race will not work against me.
25. If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it has racial overtones.
26. I can choose blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" color that more or less match my skin.
Elusive and fugitive
I repeatedly forgot each of the realizations on this list until I wrote it down. For me white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it is great, for in facing it I must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is not such a free country; one's life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own.
In unpacking this invisible knapsack of white privilege, I have listed conditions of daily experience that I once took for granted. Nor did I think of any of these perquisites as bad for the holder. I now think that we need a more finely differentiated taxonomy of privilege, for some of these varieties are only what one would want for everyone in a just society, and others give license to be ignorant, oblivious, arrogant, and destructive.
I see a pattern running through the matrix of white privilege, a pattern of assumptions that were passed on to me as a white person. There was one main piece of cultural turf; it was my own turf, and I was among those who could control the turf. My skin color was an asset for any more I was educated to want to make. I could think of myself as belonging in major ways and of making social systems work for me. I could freely disparage, fear, neglect, or be oblivious to anything outside of the dominant cultural forms. Being of the main culture, I could also criticize it fairly freely.
In proportion as my racial group was being made confident, comfortable, and oblivious, other groups were likely being made unconfident, uncomfortable, and alienated. Whiteness protected me from many kinds of hostility, distress, and violence, which I was being subtly trained to visit, in turn, upon people of color.
For this reason, the word "privilege" now seems to me misleading. We usually think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or luck. Yet some of the conditions I have described here work systematically to over empower certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance because of one's race or sex.

 

[vivekap2007]

Earned strength, unearned power
I want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned power conferred systemically. Power from unearned privilege can look like strength when it is in fact permission to escape or to dominate. But not all of the privileges on my list are inevitably damaging. Some, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you, or that your race will not count against you in court, should be the norm in a just society. others, like the privilege to ignore less powerful people, distort the humanity of the holders as well as the ignored groups.
We might at least start by distinguishing between positive advantages, which we can work to spread, and negative types of advantage, which unless rejected will always reinforce our present hierarchies. For example, the feeling that one belongs within the human circle, as Native Americans say, should not be seen as privilege for a few. Ideally it is an unearned entitlement. At present, since only a few have it, it is an unearned advantage for them. This paper results from a process of coming to see that some of the power that I originally saw as attendant on being a human being in the United States consisted in unearned advantage and conferred dominance.
I have met very few men who are truly distressed about systemic, unearned male advantage and conferred dominance. And so one question for me and others like me is whether we will be like them, or whether we will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage and conferred dominance, and, if so, what we will do to lessen them. In any case, we need to do more work in identifying how they actually affect our daily lives. Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the United States think that racism doesn't affect them because they are not people of color; they do not see "whiteness" as a racial identity. In addition, since race and sex are not the only advantaging systems at work, we need similarly to examine the daily experience of having age advantage, or ethnic advantage, or physical ability, or advantage related to nationality, religion, or sexual orientation.
Difficulties and dangers surrounding the task of finding parallels are many. Since racism, sexism, and heterosexism are not the same, the advantages associated with them should not be seen as the same. In addition, it is hard to disentangle aspects of unearned advantage that rest more on social class, economic class, race, religion, sex, and ethnic identity than on other factors. Still, all of the oppressions are interlocking, as the members of the Combahee River Collective pointed out in their "Black Feminist Statement" of 1977.
One factor seems clear about all of the interlocking oppressions. They take both active forms, which we can see, and embedded forms, which as a member of the dominant group one is taught not to see. In my class and place, I did not see myself as a racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth.
Disapproving of the systems won't be enough to change them. I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitudes. But a "white" skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us. Individual acts can palliate, but cannot end, these problems.
To redesign social systems we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political tool here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and conferred dominance by making these subjects taboo. Most talk by whites about equal opportunity seems to me now to be about equal opportunity to try to get into a position of dominance while denying that systems of dominance exist.
[continued from above post]
It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already.
Although systemic change takes many decades, there are pressing questions for me and, I imagine, for some others like me if we raise our daily consciousness on the perquisites of being light-skinned. What will we do with such knowledge? As we know from watching men, it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned advantage to weaken hidden systems of advantage, and whether we will use any of our arbitrarily awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base.

 

[DarkChild]

dont want to open another can of worms - but i think its worth people reading and understanding the flipside of the AA argument.
i always find it funny that the people who whine and complain about AA always do so on the grounds that its unfair to them. i love it when i see these little runty, pasty pre-med geeks complain. STFU - take a walk outside, get some sun and realize that the world doesnt revolve around you.

 

[Perseverant 1]

I am so sick of hearing the posts about AA and people who are white complaining about it. I am so sick of the whole concept actually!
Here is a suggestion, why don't we concentrate on what unites us as human beings rather then pick out the few things that make us so different from each other. If you think about it, we fundamentally have so much more that makes us the same rather then different. Can't we all just get along?

 

[Mr.Smile12]

Bumping from the archive (over 20 years ago). FYI, in light of the impending SCOTUS decision in 2023.

 

[Angler]

impending SCOTUS decision

I sense it won't go well. I also sense that this thread may not go well.

 

[gyngyn]

I sense it won't go well. I also sense that this thread may not go well.

You're probably right.
At the first sign of incivility, it will be closed.
It will be the oldest thread I've ever locked!

 

[Mr.Smile12]

You can lock it once the decision is out. At the very least, it's interesting how the arguments haven't changed in 20 years (for or against). I'm sure a ton of others will comment with new threads.

 

[Angus Avagadro]

It might be a 20 yr old thread, but I still get triggered when I'm referred to as a provider. My diploma doesn't say Provider. I'm lumped into the same category as a Massage Therapist or Aroma Therapist. Ok, I had a moment. Don't close the thread because of me!

 

[gyngyn]

It might be a 20 yr old thread, but I still get triggered when I'm referred to as a provider.

It reminds me of that old Star Trek episode...

 

[Angler]

It reminds me of that old Star Trek episode...

But then, how would we do auscultation, palpation, percussion, etc... We'd have no hands

 

[BoctorBro]

It’s good to hear that the AAMC still wants to keep diversity initiatives but I’m very worried that they’ll be threatened by the Supreme Court decision. Recently Texas and Florida have banned DEI offices and resources at public universities. If this happens across the country how would schools adapt?

 

[deleted1065184]

It’s good to hear that the AAMC still wants to keep diversity initiatives but I’m very worried that they’ll be threatened by the Supreme Court decision. Recently Texas and Florida have banned DEI offices and resources at public universities. If this happens across the country how would schools adapt?

Doubt it'll happen to most states, but I believe Texas and Florida banning DEI offices (often the only space for marginalized students to feel safe/included) will ultimately hurt them at all levels.

I was planning on applying to residencies in Texas and Florida, but they're currently off my list. And I have several friends who also took them off. I suspect this will become more widespread in the next several years, especially as Texas and Florida continue to become more and more diverse.

 

[Mr.Smile12]

Doubt it'll happen to most states, but I believe Texas and Florida banning DEI offices (often the only space for marginalized students to feel safe/included) will ultimately this will only hurt them at all levels.

I was planning on applying to residencies in Texas and Florida, but they're currently off my list. And I have several friends who also took them off. I suspect this will become more widespread in the next several years, especially as Texas and Florida continue to become more and more diverse.

This could be a problem with Texas though because of the TMDSAS schools highly preferring in-state applicants and an expectation to mission that they serve in their in-state area. So yes, I'm sure it will be an issue getting OOS applicants, but I'm not sure the in-state pool will strangely benefit... presuming the status quo politically.

 

[deleted1065184]

This could be a problem with Texas though because of the TMDSAS schools highly preferring in-state applicants and an expectation to mission that they serve in their in-state area. So yes, I'm sure it will be an issue getting OOS applicants, but I'm not sure the in-state pool will strangely benefit... presuming the status quo politically.

Maybe! I personally think it'll negatively impact in-state admissions as well, because I suspect more students from marginalized groups will choose to do college and medical school out of state. Yes, the low tuition is still a helpful pull.

However, each year there are many students who could go to schools out of state on scholarship who choose to stay in Texas because they want to be closer to family/friends. However, completely eliminating DEI offices will definitely be enough to scare some talented students away.

 

[Angler]

I was planning on applying to residencies in Texas and Florida, but they're currently off my list. And I have several friends who also took them off. I suspect this will become more widespread in the next several years, especially as Texas and Florida continue to become more and more diverse.

I'm pretty certain that the highly reputed "private" programs in red states (like Duke, Vandy, Emory, Baylor, WashU) all promote DEI, and that residents would feel very comfortable there.

My daughter is entering Med School in a little over a month. She's never known what it's like to be in a conservative area, but she will soon have to. I think that this is a very good thing.

On another note, if one reads the Mission Statements of medical schools across the country, many include mention of DEI (including public institutions in red states). I wonder when that might change!

 

[deleted1065184]

I'm pretty certain that the highly reputed "private" programs in red states (like Duke, Vandy, Emory, Baylor, WashU) all promote DEI, and that residents would feel very comfortable there.

My daughter is entering Med School in a little over a month. She's never known what it's like to be in a conservative area, but she will soon have to. I think that this is a very good thing.

On another note, if one reads the Mission Statements of medical schools across the country, many include mention of DEI (including public institutions in red states). I wonder when that might change!

I didn't say anything about red states, I mentioned Texas and Florida specifically. I'm from the South, I don't have any fear of red states. I grew up in one, I'm a country fella lol. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Baylor and TCU are the only private MD schools in the state of Texas.

Baylor is the only school you listed that is in Texas or Florida...and while it's private, I'm not sure if Texas recent ruling will impact it or not considering it just became part of TMDSAS and (I believe) receives state funding.

Anyway, this is all just speculation right now. We'll see what happens, but I'm not too hopeful for Texas and Florida right now.