It’s closer than you might think.

Could the day come when you are denied medical treatment because you’re white, male, or a member of some other group of “oppressors”? Of course it could, and it’s coming sooner than you might think. Even in solidly red Tennessee, where Donald Trump won 60% of the vote in 2020, a new report has revealed what the Tennessee Star on Friday called “the pervasive infiltration of woke diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ideologies in Tennessee medical school curricula and programs.” Could this have an impact on the quality of your medical treatment? You bet your life — and you may end up having to do so.

The report comes from Do No Harm, an organization that is devoted to protecting “patients, physicians, and healthcare itself from the practice of medicine based on discriminatory, divisive ideologies.” Do No Harm states that “the same radical movement behind ‘Critical Race Theory’ in the classroom and ‘Defund the Police’ is coming after healthcare, but hardly anyone knows it.”

One of those who do is John Sailer, a fellow at the National Association of Scholars, who published a chilling article in The Tablet last Wednesday entitled “Welcome to America’s Racialized Medical Schools.” The subtitle was “Forget about the oath to do no harm, future doctors are being forced to swear allegiance to racial dogmas.” Sailer noted that “increasingly, medical schools and schools of public health are enthusiastically embracing the values of DEI and instituting far-reaching policies to demonstrate their commitments to the cause. To many in the universities and perhaps in the country at large, these values sound benign—merely an invitation to treat everyone fairly. In practice, however, DEI policies often promote a narrow set of ideological views that elevate race and gender to matters of supreme importance.” A key aspect of this initiative is “a research methodology called ‘public health critical race praxis’ (PHCRP)—designed, as the name suggests, to apply critical race theory to the field of public health.”

The practical upshot of this is that conventional triage, which in emergency rooms prioritizes treatment based on the seriousness of each patient’s condition, will go out the window. Instead, those who are considered part of “victim” groups will receive preferential treatment, while those who are part of what are designated as “oppressor” classes will go to the back of the line, if they get treated at all. This is already happening: Sailer pointed out that “during the height of the COVID pandemic, New York, Minnesota, and Utah issued guidance for allocating monoclonal antibodies that heavily prioritized racial and ethnic minorities.”

Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), minced no words, declaring that these programs “should be called what they are: anti-white, anti-excellence, anti-science, and anti-Christian.” She added that they “sacrifice the needs of patients, even their lives, to a totalitarian political ideology.”

The prospects for reform, however, are bleak. Orient explained that these programs are “pervasive in organized medicine as well. The advocacy agenda of the American Medical Association (AMA) and others is completely ‘Woke’ and punishes dissent. The ultimate ‘equity’ is equal immiseration and death.”

The new emphasis on wokeness in medicine has such disquieting implications that even the uber-Leftist Washington Post has come out against it. Marilyn Singleton, a board-certified anesthesiologist and visiting fellow at Do No Harm, stated in the Post last Wednesday that “when I graduated with a medical degree in 1973, a Black woman in a class of mostly White men, there was a real sense that the days of obsessing over skin color and making race-based assumptions about our fellow human beings was finally fading — and, hopefully, soon gone for good.” But then came the Left’s present-day fixation on racial issues: “That racial obsession has come rushing back — in academia, politics, business and even in my beloved medical profession. But now it’s coming from the opposite direction. The malignant false assumption that Black people are inherently inferior intellectually has been traded in for the malignant false assumption that White people are inherently racist.” And therefore less deserving of medical treatment.

Sanity is not going to return anytime soon. The Star reports that “on February 16, Joe Biden issued an executive order that mandated all agencies of the executive branch to embrace the radical DEI agenda.” Expect more polarization, more victimhood hucksterism, and thus more resentment at what will be claimed to be the lingering effects of “systemic racism.” That will just start the cycle all over again. And once it has become taken for granted that the woke elite’s favored groups should get preferential treatment for medical care, how far away will the day be when you’re denied treatment because you’ve been designated a “MAGA Republican” or an “insurrectionist” over your opposition to the dominant Leftist ideology?

Eat right, exercise, get plenty of rest, and take care of yourself. As this continues, getting sick is going to be an increasingly risky proposition.

Article posted with permission from Robert Spencer