Chicago Medical School Teaches Students That White People ‘Avoid Social Accountability’

Recordings of a class at a medical school in Chicago showed a professor telling students that white people “avoid social accountability” and that ascribing health outcomes to individual behavior ignores “structural influences.”

The recordings were of “Principles of Professionalism, Health Care, and Health Equity,” a class at the medical school of Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science. The recordings, along with a syllabus of the class, were obtained by the medical watchdog group Do No Harm and shared with the Washington Examiner.

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According to the materials obtained by Do No Harm, the professor says race “is not scientific nor biological” and that the idea that black people are inferior is “a dominant narrative perpetuated by medicine.”

“Who benefits [from this narrative]?” the professor asks in the video, “Whites or the dominant class. The privileges of the dominant class are rationalized. They get to avoid the social accountability.”

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“With overemphasis on culture, individual behavior, and biology and genetics to explain poor health, we are missing the opportunity to address why people are sick,” the slide presented in the course reads.

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The course also assigned several other resources, including a TED talk and a research paper, that argue that the medical industry is steeped in racism. One paper, titled “White Privilege in a White Coat: How Racism Shaped my Medical Education,” alleges that “white physicians seldom ask how their own racial privilege reinforces a white supremacist culture and what effects this may have on our patients’ health.”

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