The Daily Signal - INTERVIEW | How Woke Agenda Infiltrated Medical Schools, Author Kenny Xu Explains

Episode Date: March 13, 2023

Kenny Xu, author of "An Inconvenient Minority: The Ivy League Admissions Cases and the Attack on Asian-American Excellence," joins the show to explain how the woke agenda made its way into medical schools. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Monday, March 13th. I'm Jared Stetman, and on this episode, I'm joined by Kenny Shue, the president of Color Us United, who joins the show from CPAC to talk about the problem of wokeness in medical schools and what can be done about it. We'll get to my conversation with Kenny Shoe after this. Hi, I'm John Carlo Canaparo. And I'm Zach Smith. And we host Scotus 101. It's a podcast where you'll get a breakdown of top cases in the highest court in the land.

hear from some of the greatest legal minds. And of course, get a healthy dose of Supreme Court trivia. Want to listen? Find us wherever you get your podcasts or just head to heritage.org slash podcasts. This is Jared Stedman with The Daily Signal. I'm joined now by Kenny Shue, who is the author of an inconvenient minority and the president of Color Us United. Kenny, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. I'm excited to be on. Thank you.

Absolutely. And I wanted to bring you on because your organization, I think, is working on. something that is very important. You recently circled a petition at the University of North Carolina Medical School to end diversity, equity, inclusion programs that you say are interfering with the actual job of training new medical students in the future. And of course, this has been a big issue at the University of North Carolina where recently there was a vote to end DEI programs at the school. Can you talk about your efforts and talk about what's going on at UNC Medical School? Yeah, this is a big story. I'm very excited to remember.

report that after the efforts of Colorist United, the James Martin Center do no harm other groups, and of course the Board of Trustees, the University of North Carolina voted to end the use of DEI statements in tenure, promotion, and hiring. That means that they can never solicit a person's political beliefs or their statements on so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion to become a medical faculty, which is great because you don't hire medical faculty to, uh, to do diversity things. You hire medical faculty to be good doctors, right? And this is part of our larger effort. This is just the first step in our effort. Our ultimate goal at Colorist United is to bring the dean, Dean Wesley Burks, who I've heard is a good person, to publicly repudiate diversity,

equity, and inclusion. Because are there problems in the medical community related to access to health care? Absolutely. but these problems should not be framed as racial problems, because these doctors are working as hard as they can. They truly live out the Hippocratic Oath. They are not racist, and it is silly to accuse them of being racist in an attempt to solve the problems in health care going on today. Yeah, talk a little bit more about that because I think it's interesting you bring up the issue of the Hippocratic Oath. I think we've seen recently at the University of Columbia Medical School where Hippocratic Oath was essentially changed to focus on social justice instead of, medicine do no harm, the things that people traditionally associate with medicine, you think your doctor's going to treat you because you have an injury, you have a surgery that needs to be done,

not based on your race. Do you think this transformation is happening in our science and medical fields? And it sounds like there may be now a pushback, certainly from your organization and others. Yeah, so I want to bring actually a media archetype up to mind. People always tend to think about like the arrogant surgeon, right? You know, like the surgeon, the Benedict Cumberbatch surgeon who's super confident in what he does, but like not a nice person. But let me tell you, would you rather take that person who has a, you know, 0.01% misrate on his surgeries,

or would you rather take the really nice, inclusive-sounding person who uses all of your correct pronouns, but who has a 3% misrate? and surgery. This is the problem with DEI, is that it actually distracts medical education from the primary purpose of what a doctor should be, which is to save lives, to not harm people, to do the best that they can. These days at UNC Medical School, they are teaching their medical residents about, quote-unquote, unconscious bias, saying that we need to investigate health disparities through the lens of social justice. This is dangerous because when you're learning

about investigating health disparities from the lens of social justice, you know what you're not learning about? How to treat medical problems? How to treat somebody's broken ankle? How to treat somebody's open heart surgery? And that's something that we are reminding the medical community about. Absolutely. It's interesting where this is coming from because I think that this is oftentimes pushed by administrations, administrators at schools. What do a lot of young, especially medical students, think about this? Assumably, they get into medicine to be, good doctors not to be social justice warriors. What do you think the kind of attitude from a lot of medical students? They just do this because they have to? They do it because they're into this? Why do you

think this is? I think that there are some medical students who are committed social justice warriors. But I think the vast majority of medical students, they just, they genuinely care about people and they're compassionate of people. This is by the way the kinds of people, the DEI ideology, tends to fool, compassionate, loving people who want to help people. They look at the words diversity and inclusion. They think that means a great thing, but they don't understand what it really means. It means we're going to look through things at the lens of race, and we're going to assume that your institution is institutionally racist.

How would you like to work for a racist institution? And the other thing that I talk to, when I talk to doctors and incoming doctors, medical students about this problem, the way that I like to frame it is, how would you like to be at the bottom of the totem pole? and nobody of course wants to be at the bottom of the totem pole, but that's increasingly what doctors are becoming in our society. They used to be the most respected profession in America and in the world. We used to really have place a high level of respect for doctors,

give them a lot of autonomy to do what they want, and, you know, because they did years and years of schooling in their practice so that they could have the kind of prestige that they do. But now the doctors aren't the lowest of the totem pole because now it's the health care administrators and the bureaucrats who put all of these rules on these doctors, not just DEI related, but DEI is definitely a component of it. Now, you know, in many states across the United States, there are more and more regulations on what doctors can say, what they can't say, what they can do, what they can practice, and DEI is a step in the wrong direction for sure.

Absolutely, it sounds like it. Well, your organization has done great work on this issue. where can we find more information about your information and what you do? So the key is to go to color us united.org. Go to our website, sign our petition, our UNC petition. Because when we're speaking for UNC medical system, which is a $5.8 billion system, we're really speaking for medical schools and hospitals across the country. Our first step is to get Dean Birx to renounce DEI, then we will move across the rest of the hospitals in the country.

So please support our petition. especially if you were a North Carolina resident. We want 10,000 signatures to our petition. Go to our website, coloristunited.org, sign our petition. Thank you so much, Kenny, for joining us on the show. Thank you, sir. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thank you for listening to my interview with Kenny Shue.

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