NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {T} his week, the American College of Surgeons (ACS) is holding its annual Clinical Congress in Boston. The ACS is the oldest and largest professional organization in the world representing surgery and surgeons. Over the four days of the meeting, dozens of courses in all areas of surgery will be offered to provide attendees (“Fellows”) with opportunities to grow professionally and improve the quality of surgical care. What is little known outside of the college is that, after the death of George Floyd, ACS leadership declared that the organization itself is structurally racist, expanding this claim to include its own member surgeons and even the practice of surgery itself. ACS leaders even went so far as to posit that poorer outcomes in black patients after surgery might be due to racism and that black patients might fare better if operated upon by black surgeons.
The leadership offered not a shred of evidence beyond the presence of recognized disparities to support these astounding and repugnant claims. But a lack of evidence did not stop the ACS Board of Regents from going all-out in embracing critical race theory, installing anti-racism precepts in the organization, implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and creating a new executive-level department devoted to DEI. One of its first actions was to host a retreat in June 2021 for the leaders of 50 surgical societies on diversity. The keynote speaker was Ibram X. Kendi, the high priest of anti-racism. Kendi is known for his belief that the answer to racial discrimination is reverse (or antiracist) discrimination. He has proposed a federal department of anti-racism, which would have oversight and punitive authority over all other departments. He refuses to debate anyone who disagrees with him because, he claims, his critics are “arguing against themselves.”
For all its hype, the DEI industry spawned by critical race theory and anti-racism is now coming apart at the seams. The Black Lives Matter organization has imploded in the wake of allegations of misuse of funds and the investigation of co-founder, Patrisse Cullors. Boston University is investigating the possible misuse of millions of dollars in donations the Center for Antiracism Research at Boston University received since its founding. The center is headed by none other than Kendi. Under Kendi’s leadership, the center has produced no meaningful original research over its three years and recently laid off many of its staff.
DEI administrators in universities, corporations, and professional organizations across the country are being laid off as the cost and lack of benefit of these initiatives have become increasingly evident.
Despite this, the American College of Surgeons is doubling down on DEI and anti-racism. Rather than reconsider its commitment to anti-racism and DEI initiatives, the leadership is now offering courses on them at the upcoming Clinical Congress. Offerings include:
The full program reveals other courses in a similar vein.
There is, again, no evidence for these approaches. Implicit bias is the discredited concept that we all harbor unconscious racial prejudices that manifest in our interactions with those of other races. This underlies the allegation that white surgeons treat black patients differently than they do white patients. Can there be a more poisonous claim to destroy patient trust in surgeons who are not of their race? The other notions are similarly destructive.
Surgeons should not advance DEI and anti-racist ideology. Surgery should not be practiced according to group identity. Instead, surgeons should treat each patient as an individual, in accord with the time-honored Hippocratic oath — or with the ACS’s own mission statement: “To Serve All With Skill and Fidelity.” When the primacy of excellence in surgery is subordinated to DEI, the quality of surgical care inevitably suffers. This hurts us all, both surgeons and our patients. Ideology has no place in the practice of our profession.
Don’t expect any discussion or debate from the floor of the Clinical Congress this week on the wisdom of the ACS adopting these initiatives and offering these courses. The leadership decided on its present course without involvement of the membership and has shut down any discussion and debate on the subject. This includes permanently banning Fellows of the ACS who object too vociferously, even if it means violating standing rules in the bylaws of the college.
Take my own story, for example. In April 2021, the ACS leadership banned me for life from access to the online discussion forums for Fellows, from access to the members directory, and from my own private messages. The grounds for these dramatic steps: I objected to the labeling of my Fellow surgeons and me as racists, and to the characterization of the ACS as a racist organization. Because I would not back down, the Board of Regents slapped me down without due process. That this occurred in this venerable organization in which I have been a Fellow for over 30 years still leaves me in disbelief.
Whether it is complicit or simply clueless, I believe the ACS leadership’s embrace of critical race theory will destroy it as a respected, viable organization. As a formerly proud Fellow, I consider this tragic.