Supreme Court Justice Jackson's second error reveals another industry gone woke

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's defense of racial discrimination is falling apart. 

It’s now well known that Jackson repeated an embarrassing falsehood while defending affirmative action in college admissions. In her Students for Fair Admissions dissent, she asserted that matching Black physicians with Black patients doubles survival rates for newborns, a claim that’s equally unbelievable and factually unsupported.  

But this is not the only mistake Jackson made. Her second error shows the diversity-industrial complex’s deep corruption of medicine – and its threat to Americans’ health.   

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Jackson wrote, "research shows that Black physicians are more likely to accurately assess Black patients’ pain tolerance and treat them accordingly," for instance, "prescribing them appropriate amounts of pain medication." A footnote refers to an amicus brief from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), the same source that led to Jackson’s first mistake.   

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was unable to define the word "woman" when asked at her confirmation hearing last year, made a telling error during her affirmation action decision. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

The AAMC brief refers to four studies in support of this claim.   

Yet none of them examine whether Black doctors are better at treating the pain of Black patients. All four document Black patients’ problems with pain management, but crucially, not one examines the efficacy of doctors of different races. The AAMC either failed to read the research or deliberately created this claim out of whole cloth.   

It's unfortunate that Jackson and her elite-trained clerks were led astray by yet another falsehood. But it’s unconscionable that the Association of American Medical Colleges got the facts so wrong in such a high-stakes case. Most concerning of all, it’s unsurprising for this once prestigious yet still powerful organization.   

The AAMC, which represents every accredited medical school in the U.S. and Canada, has elevated diversity to an absurd level. It holds, as an article of faith, that medical schools must recruit more Black students, even if that means discriminating against students of other races and lowering standards for admission.   

Not only does the AAMC brook no arguments to the contrary, but it also misreads research and perhaps manufactures evidence to support its position.   

These are the actions of a radicalized organization – one that puts political demands above its stated goal of improving medical education. The AAMC’s faulty justification of race-based admissions, seen in its amicus brief, is bad enough. Yet the association’s extremist turn doesn’t end there.   

The AAMC has quietly graded its member schools’ commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. Through freedom of information reports, we have found reports from 34 medical schools, detailing their implementation of 89 AAMC-approved DEI initiatives.   

The list includes hiring and promoting professors based on DEI metrics, creating a permanent DEI bureaucracy, lobbying for DEI policies at every level of government and making DEI a "key learning outcome." The average medical school has complied with 85% of the AAMC’s wishes.   

It's unfortunate that Jackson and her elite-trained clerks were led astray by yet another falsehood. But it’s unconscionable that the Association of American Medical Colleges got the facts so wrong in such a high-stakes case. Most concerning of all, it’s unsurprising for this once prestigious yet still powerful organization.   

The corruption of curriculum is especially concerning. Last summer, the AAMC released new "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Competencies," which effectively dictate what medical schools teach. Future physicians must now master "intersectionality," describing "how each identity may result in varied and multiple forms of oppression or privilege related to clinical decisions and practice."   

Other mandatory topics include "colonization, white supremacy, acculturation, [and] assimilation." The AAMC sponsors medical schools’ accrediting body, so institutions that don’t teach these medical divisive concepts risk losing their ability to issue degrees.   

The AAMC’s actions are lowering, not raising, the quality of medical education, which in turn lowers the quality of future medical care. By repeating the organization’s false claims about racial preferences in college admissions, Justice Jackson has shined a light on the deeper danger that DEI poses to Americans’ health and well-being. 

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Jay P. Greene is a Senior Fellow at Do No Harm.