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Students will learn to recognize how ‘positions of power and privilege’ function
The George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences is offering a course to “change racist culture” through its Anti-Racism Coalition’s educational series.
The course, titled “Moving Beyond Bystanding…to Disrupting Racism,” is offered to students, researchers, clinicians, administrators, faculty, and staff, according to the course info page on the school’s website.
“No matter what role you have, this training will allow for you to recognize your responsibility in contributing to an antiracist institutional culture,” the page states.
It also states that the course “isn’t a typical bystander training.”
“Bystanders address individual feelings- and its personal impact- in the moment. But, what happens if the bystander does not recognize a comment as a microaggression or a decision as reflecting racial bias? Nothing changes. But even if they do recognize and report it, the systems that currently exist largely produce, if not maintain, racism,” the page reads.
Further, the course calls for “disruptors” who will combat personal and institutional values “to change racist culture, policies, and practices.”
Participants will learn to recognize how “positions of power and privilege” function and contrast the roles of bystanders and disrupters when facing racism.
But Stanley Goldfarb, the chairman of the medical advocacy group Do No Harm, told The College Fix that this course infuses a political agenda into medical education.
“GW School of Medicine should rename the course to ‘Moving Beyond Medicine … to Embracing Identity Politics,’” the medical doctor said.
“It is almost laughable and deeply concerning that pseudoscientific social justice training qualifies for Continuing Medical Education credit,” he told The Fix.
Goldfarb added that there is nothing of value in the course for medical students.
“Simply put, this is not medicine,” he said. “A real healthcare professional would not blame every racial disparity on bias but would instead look at the whole picture, including comorbidities, genetics, lifestyle, and other relevant factors.”
Goldfarb claimed that, despite the “dishonest” course’s claims, “implicit bias” is not the cause of health disparities.
“Do No Harm has on multiple occasions, debunked studies that claim that racial concordance will improve health outcomes,” he said.
Still, courses rooted in DEI and systemic racism are being offered to anyone in the medical industry who will take them, he said.
Goldfarb said courses should be “grounded in medical evidence and rigorous scientific inquiry, not methodologically shoddy ‘studies.'”
While GW Medical School did not respond to The College Fix‘s request for comment, the course’s creators, including GW medical educator Dr. Maranda Ward and pediatrician Dr. Olanrewaju Falusi, defended the course’s framework in an article published by MedPage Today.
They believe the training is necessary because research shows “that unconscious stereotypes shape physician behavior and produce.”
“Across 25 George Washington University departments and 338 participants in the online training (Part I), and 10 departments with 226 in-person participants (Part II), learners consistently demonstrated growth in anti-racism awareness and responsibility,” they wrote.
The authors also advocated for physicians to reflect on whether their patient interactions where impacted by implicit bias.
“Rounds can end with a simple but powerful question: ‘Did we consider whether bias influenced this care plan?’ This small pause mirrors the safety checklists that normalized hand hygiene. It shifts equity from a conversation to standardized practice,” they wrote.
They also recommended analyzing and publishing data by demographic. “Patterns in patient satisfaction, readmission rates, or delays in follow-up can be analyzed by demographic group. Publishing this data across service lines makes accountability a collective outcome,” they wrote.
Several other top-rated medical schools are also prioritizing DEI and anti-racism in their curricula, The College Fix previously reported.
For example, the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine seeks to be “the most diverse, equitable and inclusive academic medical system in the country,” according to the school’s website.
