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Moralistic Therapeutic Med School

Erasing the white stain from medical history, one woke med school at a time

If it’s [any day of the week], our Very Woke Media is going to find some new way of telling the story about how white people, especially white male people, are the worst people in the world, and need to be Otherized for the common good. Yesterday it was NPR, bringing to us this “health news,” as they call it. The story starts like this:

A few years ago, TV celebrity Rachel Maddow was at Rockefeller University to hand out a prize that’s given each year to a prominent female scientist. As Maddow entered the auditorium, someone overheard her say, “What is up with the dude wall?”

She was referring to a wall covered with portraits of scientists from the university who have won either a Nobel Prize or the Lasker Award, a major medical prize.

“One hundred percent of them are men. It’s probably 30 headshots of 30 men. So it’s imposing,” says Leslie Vosshall, a neurobiologist with the university and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

“I think every institution needs to go out into the hallway and ask, ‘What kind of message are we sending?’ ”

Vosshall says Maddow’s remark, and the word “dude wall,” crystallized something that had been bothering her for years. As she travels around the country to give lectures and attend conferences at scientific institutions, she constantly encounters lobbies, conference rooms, passageways, and lecture halls that are decorated with portraits of white men.

“It just sends the message, every day when you walk by it, that science consists of old white men,” says Vosshall. “I think every institution needs to go out into the hallway and ask, ‘What kind of message are we sending with these oil portraits and dusty old photographs?'”

Leslie Vosshall is in most respects vastly more intelligent than I am, but she is a racist, sexist nitwit. What kind of crazy person looks at portraits of a medical school’s Nobel Prize winners and other alumni who have great achievements to their name, and only sees … white men. Who are (therefore) bad people who need to be erased from public life and the institution’s memory?

She is not alone. More:

At Yale School of Medicine, for example, one main building’s hallways feature 55 portraits: three women and 52 men. They’re all white.

“I don’t necessarily always have a reaction. But then there are times when you’re having a really bad day — someone says something racist to you, or you’re struggling with feeling like you belong in the space — and then you see all those photos and it kind of reinforces whatever you might have been feeling at the time,” says Max Jordan Nguemeni Tiako, a medical student at Yale.

He grew up reading Harry Potter books, and in that fictional world, portraits can talk to the characters. “If this was Harry Potter,” he muses, “if they could speak, what would they even say to me? Everywhere you study, there’s a big portrait somewhere of someone kind of staring you down.”

Good grief! So all the achievement of those men in the institution’s past must be suppressed because a black student there is a neurotic. Why can’t he look at that wall and think, “In the future, I will work hard enough so that my face hangs from that wall”? No, instead these egalitarians will have to deny the achievements of these past physicians and educators, because it doesn’t suit current ideology.

This is racist and sexist. But this is what the egalitarians are telling themselves to cover up their despicable deeds. Ally Cara is a PhD student at the University of Michigan:

The photos are now in a less noticeable spot: the department chair’s office suite. And the seminar room will soon be decorated with artwork depicting key discoveries made by the department’s faculty, students, and trainees.

“We really want to emphasize that we’re not trying to erase our history,” says Cara. “We’re proud of the people who have brought us to where we are today as a department. But we also want to show that we have a diverse and inclusive department.”

“We’re not trying to erase our history,” she lied.

That’s exactly what all these people are doing: erasing history, because it is ideologically offensive to them. The presence in the historical record of white male achievement is intolerable. These men did not fight for the Confederacy; they did great things to advance medicine, the science of human healing. But the deeds and accomplishments of these men, in the minds of these fanatics, detracts from women and people of color. So, to the broom closet with them.

The story features exactly one voice, a tentative one, of a dissenter. Dr. Jeffrey Flier is a former dean of Harvard Medical School. He tweeted this about a recent visit to a lecture hall at one of Harvard’s teaching hospitals:

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

“Afraid to say openly” — because they’re intimidated by the commissars. I keep hearing this, over and over: that people see injustices like this, and they hate it, but they keep their mouths shut because they’re afraid. Guess what, people: this is how bigotry and oppression takes root. In part because of your cowardly silence.

You know that “deep and boiling anger” that the NBC/WSJ poll found in America today? This is one reason for it. The American elites are taking up a racist, sexist ideology, and using it to suppress historical memory, and to disempower people on the basis of their sex and ethnicity. It was wrong when it was done in the past, and it’s wrong to do it today.

Gosh, medical school elites, and media elites, I can’t imagine why teenage white males hear or read stories like this, and conclude that the system is stacked against them, solely because of their sex and skin color. I can’t imagine why the rancid appeals of the racist alt-right appeal to them. (Sarcasm off.)

“We’re not trying to erase our history.” Liar. Bigot.

And you watch: if Trump gets re-elected, these people at the medical schools, and in the newsrooms, will be shocked and grieving, with no comprehension at all about their own role in bringing that about.

Let’s say we were talking about the Berklee School of Music, and most of the high-achieving graduates in jazz in the school’s history were black men. If there were a move to remove or relocate portraits of those men because it would make white students feel unwelcome or ill at ease, we would know exactly what was going on here: a racist attempt to deny history, and human achievement. But in this case it’s happening to white males, who, in the eyes of American elites, are demons.

There will be a terrible price to pay for this, you progressive trolls.

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