Medical reform group says this research project sounds like activism, not scholarship
Proponents of “racial equity” training have received $5 million from the National Institutes of Health to “generate evidence” in support of their program at the University of Pittsburgh.
The researchers will “test the effectiveness of the Racial Equity Consciousness Institute” which is “an effort aimed at addressing systemic racism.”
The institute is run through Pitt’s Center on Race and Social Problems. The university’s page on “racial equity consciousness” describes “systemic racism” in medical terms, calling it a “public health crisis.”
The RECI approach uses “structured cognitive behavioral training” “to consciously address and assert one’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors toward racial equity and justice,” according to the website.
The program “employs systematic, highly-structured practices, to break down socialized, unconscious biases and behaviors, replacing them with behaviors that are more aligned with personal values,” according to the federal grant summary.
“One of the things I’m most excited about this study is to be able to generate evidence of the effectiveness of RECI,” clinical researcher Doris Rubio stated in the university news release. “I think talking to people about it and how it’s changed my life is one thing, but being able to say ‘we have evidence that this works’ is super compelling.”
“The research funded by this grant will focus on identifying the effectiveness of RECI training and other implicit bias trainings on diversity and retention as well as on attitudes that perpetuate systemic racism in healthcare outcomes, particularly among marginalized communities,” Pitt wrote in its news release.
MORE: ‘Perceived’ racism in medicine isn’t same as real bias, scholar says
The article states that this intervention will be “measured” by using “brain imaging or fMRIs” in order to see the “structural brain changes” both “before and after the intervention.”
None of the professors would provide comments on their taxpayer-funded research. The College Fix asked if they would revise their programming if the training did not work, what supporting evidence would include, and what a brain looks like after their intervention.
Professor Gretchen White declined to comment on the methods, because it is an “ongoing research article.”
Ron Idoko (pictured, right), the director of the Center on Race and Social Problems, and Rubio (pictured, left), the primary investigator, did not respond to emails and a phone call in the past five weeks.
The NIH’s media team also did not respond to emailed inquiries in the past week and a half asking about the grant and the idea of generating evidence versus testing a hypothesis.
A medical reform group said the idea of looking at brain scans to find racism “warrants a healthy dose of skepticism.”
Do No Harm Research Director Ian Kingsbury told The Fix via a media statement that the idea of being able to see racism in brain images is “disputed among scholars.”
Kingsbury said the language used by the researchers shows they are activists, not scholars.
“Activists imagine their job as ‘generating evidence of effectiveness,’” Kingsbury said. “Scholars imagine their job as rigorously testing hypotheses and discovering truth. The framing is telling.”
He criticized the use of “virus” and “vaccine” in reference to racism issues. The “racial equity” training calls racism a “social virus.” The Fix asked about using medical terms to describe race issues.
The use of these words “yield the impression that they are engaged in rigorous science instead of activism,” Kingsbury said. “I hope consumers of their work can spot the difference.”
MORE: NIH spends $136 million on racism and medicine studies
IMAGES: University of Pittsburgh
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