Rex Kerr
2 min readOct 2, 2022

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Yes, I know about all of those. And poor guidance for diagnosing skin problems, high rates of maternal mortality even after correcting for income and age, and so on. (Also, it's eGFR.)

It is no less horrifying when you contrast that with systematic dismissal of reports of pain by women of all races, proton pump inhibitors given out like candy to everyone even though use of PPIs correlates with all-cause mortality, ridiculously high rates of C-section compared to everywhere else in the world (and let's not get into the routine application of pitocin), almost complete disregard for sleep in a hospital setting to the point that if you weren't in hospital you would expect serious health problems just from disrupted sleep alone, and so on.

The point isn't that racism in medicine isn't real: it is, and it has serious, life-threatening consequences. But medicine gets poor practice established in many ways, and it's tough to get practices improved. Layer on a bit of subconscious bias, and when your life is on the line, it really matters.

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The reason I spent as much time as I did on this is because the discussion about CRT is sucking too much oxygen from the room, and is being used by people on the left--of all races--to bolster bad ideas.

And it's not obvious from a quick glance whether it's obviously a good idea, or bad, or irrelevant. It's complicated.

While it's true that Rufo's duplicitous tactic worked embarrassingly well and vaulted the words "Critical Race Theory" into public consciousness, it is not true that it is prompted by nothing, or that CRT was doing nothing before. CRT has not just restricted itself to a narrow subset of legal analysis. People in other fields are picking it up and have been for decades (Tate and Ladson-Billings recast it as an approach to education; it is part of the justification for ignoring merit; Delgado and Stefancic aspire for it to replace the ideals of equality and rationality; and so on). If it's a distraction, it's one that distracts people of all races, including those who are most passionate about improving the situation.

I think we'd be far better served by adopting a different framework. And, yes, we should absolutely teach history as it happened.

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CRT isn't the only thing I pay attention to. I agree with you that just talking at each other and doing nothing is not very useful, and I commend you for taking action instead.

(Edit: I neglected to say so initially, but thank you for all the information in your post! Although I was aware of almost everything you mention and ask whether I knew (though not always in as much detail as I should be), someone else might not be, and if they're not and they read your post they will be well-served. So I appreciate it!)

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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