The article, penned by a Los Angeles-area psychiatrist and three students at University of California medical schools, alleges that to root out White supremacy and systemic racism, the education arm of the medical profession must embrace anti-racism.
The abstract for the article “An Abolitionist Approach to Antiracist Medical Education” reads, “Medical education is limited to the biomedical model, omitting critical discourse about racism, the harm it causes minoritized patients, and medicine’s foundation and complicity in perpetuating racism.”
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“Antiracist medical education renders the invisibility of Whiteness visible to highlight its role in upholding medical racism and preventing change,” the paper further asserts. The concept of anti-racism was popularized by Boston University professor Ibram X. Kendi, who published the 2019 book How to be Antiracist, which calls for “antiracist” activism to undo systemic and structural racism.
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In an interview on the journal’s podcast, paper co-author Russyan Mark Mabeza, a student at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, asserted the purpose of the paper was to “communicate ... the reality that racism is so deeply embedded within the profession of medicine” and to “challenge [medical] trainees to think about what they’re going into.” The article notes the authors, using a grant from the American Academy of Family Physicians, created “anti-racist medical curricular content that would be accessible to any student, health professional, or institution nationwide that wanted to engage in anti-racism.”
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The paper acknowledges that while developing the curriculum, the authors began their meetings “by checking in emotionally before delving into our work, thereby creating space for grief, frustration, and anxiety” and, by doing so, “established an ongoing, dynamic system of informed consent for the emotional labor and spiritual work that anti-racism requires.”
“Most undergraduate medical education curricula are grounded in the biomedical framework, variably including health disparities data, social science principles, and, rarely, Critical Race Theory,” the paper says. “[Minority] students’ and community members’ expertise, not faculty or administrators’, fuels transformation in medical education,” the article concludes. “We urge [minority] students to take their seats at the tables they build outside of the house of medicine. The harm prevented, solidarity cultivated, radical vision nurtured, and movement advanced when like-minded medical students link up is not only worthwhile but absolutely necessary. And there is no time to wait.”
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