Diagnosing Whiteness

I’ve written in the past about the disastrous state of medical education in the United States in particular, and I fear the Anglosphere in general. 

I expect that none of you is particularly skeptical about this, but it is one thing to be abstractly aware of this as a phenomenon and another to grasp just how rapid the shift has been and how radical in nature it is. 

This is natural, because as much as we hear about “radical” change, we rarely directly experience it. Even very rapid changes we describe as “radical” are often not “radical.” 

Radical implies a fundamental discontinuity; things are one way, and suddenly they are not. Successful revolutions are generally radical in a way that elections, even with substantial changes in political direction, are not. 

What has been happening in medical schools is radical in the revolutionary sense. Medical schools are abandoning biological reality as the foundation of their educational mission and replacing it with a form of “liberation” politics. This is similar to what is happening at all educational institutions, with the twist that we can live pretty easily without Harvard graduates but not without physicians. 

A great example of this is the University of California San Francisco Medical School hosting Dante King to speak about the biological reality that all White people are psychopaths. 

.@UCSF invited Dante King to speak on “Diagnosing Whiteness.”

He claims that “whites are psychopaths” and that white people “have it written in the law you can rape black women.” He also makes excuses for black teenagers who commit violent crimes.

This is the modern university. pic.twitter.com/EzVlliZPR9

— YAF (@yaf) February 9, 2024

King does not believe this to be a metaphor, and UCSF understands this completely. 

Dante King was invited to speak as part of a series of lectures in honor of Martin Luther King, ironically enough.

When you watch the video it looks like the sort of speech that would be given at a rally by a radical communist, but this is a man who is speaking at a medical school at the invitation of the administration. He is using medical terms and speaking to, among others, psychiatrists. 

UCSF’s description of the talk is also quite clear about the connection to medicine, psychiatry, and social justice:

Dante’s talk will be an overview of the upcoming course and book Diagnosing Whiteness & Anti-Blackness: White Psychopathology, Collective Psychosis and Trauma in America.This talk will center on the development, construction, and functionality of race and racism as psychopathology, psychopathy, and sociopathy. It spotlights White-delusion as the normalized psychological and cultural context upon which all Americans live and exist. It also highlights the psychopathic and sociopathic development of anti-Blackness as an American politic. Participants are invited to evaluate their communities’, as well as their own individual relationships to Whiteness, anti-non-Whiteness, and anti-Blackness. This experience will be the start of our journey towards building a supportive community for coping and healing.

Dante King, you see, will also be teaching a course on the subject. 

I have written many times about how STEM fields have been captured by the same “decolonizing” ideology that other academic fields have been, and medicine is in this category. That is why you can trust absolutely nothing being told you by people at the top of these fields, because the fields themselves are run by people whose primary allegiance is to critical theory. 

That isn’t to say that all doctors or scientists have been so captured–most haven’t been. Rather, the commanding heights have been captured, and the goal is to silence or move out those unwilling to go along swiftly. 

No doubt we will be told that academic freedom requires allowing this kind of speech. Perhaps, perhaps not. However academic freedom is a non-issue here because there would be absolutely no room at all for a lecture arguing the same thing with any other race put in the place of “White.” 

Freedom is a red herring. There is no debate allowed. 

So yes, this is radical. A total discontinuity from anything we have seen in the past, and it needs to be rooted out.