David Larson | Duke Health has abandoned merit for DIE when picking surgeons

Going viral in the context of a hospital is almost never a good thing. And this week Duke Health and its medical school went viral in a way that certainly made a few administrators sick to their stomachs, as the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro revealed disturbing DEI-related policies at the North Carolina health provider.

One Duke surgical resident, Dr. Vignesh Raman, gave a presentation, which has since been pulled from the Duke Health website, where he discussed his feelings about having to treat people “in the South,” calling them “not VIP,” and saying his “heart sinks” when he considers that many of them might watch FOX News or support Donald Trump. Despite his apparent contempt for many of those he’s paid to care for, he did say it wasn’t all bad, because the community is “majority non-white, and its wonderful to treat such a diverse group of people.”

Shapiro found the open animosity by health providers towards conservatives elsewhere in North Carolina too, like the Wake Forest Medical School, where Kychelle Del Rosario was allowed to graduate after, seemingly, admitting to sticking a patient more than once on a blood draw because of the patient’s reaction to her she/her “pronoun pin.”

Raman revealed that this attitude also affects how his fellow left-wing providers at Duke choose who makes up the surgical team, saying that after George Floyd’s death in 2020, they realized “something should change within ourselves and in who comprises this department, in terms of the faculty, in terms of the residents.”

Raman then said, “The most important thing we’ve done is, really, systemic changes to our recruitment, to try to recruit diverse residents to our program and then to retain and support those diverse residents… So part of this has involved transitioning to completely holistic review process that we spoke about earlier today — you know, abandoning all sorts of metrics and screens, looking at people’s life story and what brought them into surgery. And the other part of it is increasing the diversity of the people who read the application, because that’s an important component of ensuring that we get diverse residents into our program.”

Reading this, I was struck by just how… illegal that sounded. I’m not a lawyer, but I have heard of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prevents discrimination based on various protected classes — like race, religion, and sex. Title VII of this law specifically bans making employment decisions based on these characteristics. Openly saying something like, “We want fewer employees of this race and this gender and more of that race and that gender” is about as blatant a violation as I can imagine.

So I said as much on Twitter, and tagged my old boss, Dan Bishop, who is currently a US congressman running for state attorney general. I was curious how he’d treat cases like this if it became his responsibility to enforce the laws in our state.

And he responded, quickly and firmly, saying, “The law on this is very clear, and it will be enforced” if he is elected. That is one issue among many, so I’m not recommending any particular candidate in that race, or any race.

Then, the original author of the article, Ben Shapiro, responded to Bishop, saying that Duke Medical School had taken down the videos in question, but that it was futile since the Daily Wire had made copies. Twitter owner Elon Musk chimed in on the thread too, saying, “People will die because of this.” (This is why, despite my best efforts to reduce Twitter time, I always come back — because sometimes you get to mix it up with people like Elon Musk, Ben Shapiro, and a congressman.)

But back to the main point on Title VII, there is an entire federal bureaucracy called the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that is tasked with making sure this is followed. This is there to protect citizens from being discriminated regarding these protected classes (race, religion, sex, etc) — and with good reason, since Jim Crow was accepted practice across the South before this became law.

But even though the original motivation was to stop discrimination against black citizens by white ones, it was not worded in a way to limit it to that particular circumstance. If an Asian Muslim woman discriminates against a Native American pagan man or a Polynesian Jewish man discriminates against a Micronesian atheist woman, and the reasoning for the discrimination is clearly because of these categories, then it’s a violation.

Editor’s Note: The views of this columnist do not necessarily reflect the views of The Laurinburg Exchange. The full article is available at carolinajournal.com.