OPINION:
Although diversity, equity and inclusion is now in considerable disrepute and even regarded as unacceptable in many contexts, the vestiges of the DEI policies that invaded and polluted our society in recent years still permeate many sectors. One of these is health care.
I recently had occasion to view the slide presentation that every nurse in the obstetrics department of a major Washington hospital is required to view as a condition of employment. The focus of the presentation is “systemic racism,” which, according to the slides shown to the nurses, insidiously permeates obstetrics.
The premise of the presentation is that “Black women, on average, receive poorer quality of care” and, as a consequence of this lesser care, “have higher rates of suffering, complications, morbidity, and death than their White counterparts.” The cause of these poorer outcomes? The alleged implicit bias of all nurses.
It is odd to note this auto-denigration of a profession that by its very nature is predicated on compassion and care. Those who choose to become health care workers tend to have compassion for fellow human beings. To launch unfounded and unqualified accusations of racism against some of the most compassionate of our fellow citizens takes a great deal of audacity.
The presentation is based on an assumption that all nurses — people who have chosen to devote their lives to the care of others — are less caring when they are entrusted with the welfare of “Black” women.
Patronizingly, the presentation suggests that White nurses cannot possibly understand the suffering endured by “West African Black people” during their enslavement. Of course, the presentation adds that this suffering is augmented by the “systemic racism” to which Black people are subjected today.
According to this propaganda, it is necessary to “recognize that Black patients walk in a different world.” The corollary is that, as a result of this condition, all White nurses (and apparently Black nurses, because they must also watch the presentation) are unable to understand the suffering that “Black birthing women” endure in giving birth.
The solution to this poor behavior by nurses both White and Black proposed by the creators of the presentation is to provide undefined “equitable care” to Black patients.
Furthermore, the presentation says that “acknowledging the legacy of racism is essential.” In other words, each nurse must, as a condition of rendering proper care to certain patients, express a mea culpa for the alleged sins of others. This confession is presumably a cleansing of the soul, which will then somehow promote better medical care.
It is also part of an attempted indoctrination. Clearly, this presentation is motivated by a specific left-wing political agenda. This must be the case because is difficult to see any relation between atonement for the sins of others and proper medical care.
Patient care does not require an awareness of the experiences of the patient’s ancestors. It assuredly does not require different treatment by reason of the color of a patient’s skin.
What the presentation actually accomplishes is to elevate a sense of alienation and discrimination between the races. Instead of motivating every nurse to consider each patient as a fellow human being who is to be treated in accordance with the same ethical code, diligence and care, it urges health care workers to see their patients through the lens of skin color. In other words, it is divisive and undermining of the very goal it is purporting to promote.
In lieu of attempting to brainwash nurses with left-wing propaganda, the hospital could simply remind the nurses of one of the injunctions set out in the Hippocratic oath: “Into whatsoever houses I enter, I will enter to help the sick, and I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm, especially from abusing the bodies of man or woman, bond or free.”
In that statement, it is made clear that care must be rendered fairly without reference to social or racial distinction. This ancient oath mandates that all — rich and poor, free and enslaved — are entitled to the same care. What could be more appropriate to an understanding of how to provide proper medical care?
Instead of spending precious funds and irreplaceable time propagating DEI gibberish, the hospital might do better to merely invoke the time-tested ethics created by the ancient Greeks some 2½ millennia ago and jettison the racialist ideology that has so harmed our society.
• Gerard Leval is a partner in the Washington office of a national law firm. He is the author of “Lobbying for Equality, Jacques Godard and the Struggle for Jewish Civil Rights During the French Revolution,” published by HUC Press.
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