Who Gets to Be Indoctrinated? The Fight Over DEI in Medicine Misses the Point

When a legal group founded by President Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller accused Johns Hopkins of “indoctrinating” medical students through diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), I got a little interested and a little provoked. Not because I agreed at all, obviously. But because the language is so familiar, and so clearly in need of challenge.

Every. Time.

Indoctrination. What a word. A word designed to shut everything down. To shut down thought. To make you recoil. To trigger that reflexive fear that someone, somewhere, is being manipulated into believing something dangerous.

But here’s the truth of it: the modern medical industry has always indoctrinated its students.

For generations, it trained doctors to believe that Black people felt less pain. (I’ve spoken about that before — you can find the link to my podcast here.) It taught that women’s ailments were “hysteria.” That indigenous healing methods and medicinal cultures were “primitive.” These weren’t fringe ideas. They were written into textbooks, taught in lecture halls, and passed down through clinical practice. And they still have consequences today.

Black women in the United States are three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. In the UK, it is even worse: Black women are four times more likely to die, even when you control for factors like education and income. Indigenous people all over the globe often avoid the inserted healthcare systems altogether because of historic mistrust. These aren’t accidents. They are the legacy of an exclusionary system.

So when America First Legal warns that Johns Hopkins is using “class as a proxy for race” to sidestep the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling, it is worth asking: why is that so problematic? Why would class being used as a proxy for race be so threatening?

Race and class in America are, of course, inextricably linked. Race was used to create class disparities in the first place. Housing. Education. Wealth-building. These were all systematically denied to Black and brown families for generations. Addressing those inequities isn’t cheating. It isn’t a sleight of hand. It is trying to catch people up.

As for the claim that diversity undermines competence? It doesn’t hold. A 2023 Journal of the American Medical Association study found that Black patients live longer in areas with more Black doctors. Patients of all backgrounds reported higher satisfaction when their physicians were trained in cultural humility. Diversity isn’t at odds with quality. It is quality.

But perhaps the most important question is this: whose story are we hearing here, and whose are we still missing?

We hear the outrage of a well-funded legal group. But what about Black mothers in maternity wards? Indigenous people avoiding care right now? First-generation medical students who grew up believing that a career in medicine was closed to them? Why are our news feeds not awash with stories from these folk?

Every debate about diversity, equity, and inclusion, especially now, is also a debate about power. About who gets to decide what counts as neutral, objective, or meritocratic.

This is where our focus (at Being Luminary) on narrative intelligence matters. The ability to quickly recognise whose voices are foregrounded, whose are omitted, and what kinds of stories are doing the work of persuasion.

Instead of asking whether DEI is indoctrination, perhaps we should ask: What would a truly unindoctrinated medical education look like? One that examines its own biases, serves every patient with dignity, and doesn’t see diversity as a threat.