FOIAed notes show how the authors in fact cut points that they said “undermined the narrative.”
A researcher who argued that infant mortality is higher for black newborns with white doctors because of racial bias omitted a variable from the paper that “undermines the narrative,” according to the researcher’s internal notes.
The study forms a keystone of the racial concordance field, which hypothesizes patients are better served by medical providers of the same race, and has served as a rationale for affirmative action. It faces new questions just as universities move to defund their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs or face legal action.
The August 2020 study in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) concluded that the gap in mortality rates between black newborns and white newborns declines by 58% if the black newborns are under the care of black physicians. A possible driver of the phenomenon could include a “spontaneous bias” by white physicians toward the babies, the researchers wrote.
The paper’s most high-profile booster was Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who cited it as evidence for the benefits of affirmative action in her dissent in the 2023 Supreme Court ruling Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which found that universities that considered the race of college applicants had violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: University Spent Over $200,000 On ‘Diversity’ Course Teaching Physicians That Healthcare Is Racist)
“For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician is tantamount to a miracle drug: it more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live,” reads an amicus brief filed by the Association of American Medical Colleges. “Yet due to the enduring and significant underrepresentation of minorities in the health professions, many minority patients will not receive care from a racially diverse team or from providers who were trained in a diverse environment.”
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