How to Write a Fake Medical Paper on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

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February 25, 2023

Anti-woke warrior James Lindsay unmasked the fakery in academia when, he, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian wrote several sham papers accepted by seven different academic journals in 2018.  The bogus papers included, “Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks” and “Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice.”  The latter integrated feminist theory in a rewrite of sections of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.  Affilia — “the only peer-reviewed, scholarly social-work journal from a feminist point of view” — published the parody as a scholarly piece.

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Lindsay has done it again, exposing the absurdity of woke medical articles.  In response to a video of students reciting their own “updated” Hippocratic Oath at Columbia University Medical School, Dr. Lindsay tweeted a fake draft paper he wrote with Dr. Boghossian in 2021.  “The Hippocratic Oath: Health Equity and Reimagining Medical Ethics” questioned the “Do No Harm” doctrine in advancing racial justice and equity.  The bogus draft was never submitted, but the authors predicted the revisionist pledge at Columbia Medical School and introduced content startlingly similar to an actual medical Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) paper published around the same time.

This paper, “Listening to Coworkers: A Health System Assessment to Understand and Address Workplace Structural Inequities” was published by peer-reviewed journal, NEJM Catalyst (a journal from the same publishers as New England Journal of Medicine).  Written by University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC) physicians, the work tries to address structural inequities “in order to… build an equitable and inclusive culture.”  Comparing this paper’s genuine introduction to Dr. Lindsay’s faked “The Hippocratic Oath,” reveals the formulaic and mindless methodology behind DEI medical manuscripts.

1.  Start with a cherry-picked anecdote of white on black violence and avoid statistics of black-on-black and black-on-white violence.

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To give the piece gravitas, use at least one anecdote from mainstream media showing a white person committing violence against an unarmed black person.  Under no circumstances should you include images of minority-perpetrated violence, such as the death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of five black police officers or the Texas school shooting in 2021 allegedly committed by Timothy George Simpkins.  Set the stage for a system based in “white supremacy” with minority populations unable to escape oppressive treatment.  Police offer strong visual representations of this system.  Forget fact-checking that proves popular racially-charged hashtags (“Every 28 hours”) false.  Omit realities like those Heather Mac Donald confirms:  “In the universe of all interracial violence between blacks and whites, blacks commit 85.5% of that interracial violence, white[s] less than 15%.”

2.  Ignore the progress made in America regarding black achievement; demand that racism be blamed regardless of evidence.

Act as though the civil rights movement never happened. Avoid the inconvenient, detailed statistics Walter Williams identifies in “Dependency, Not Poverty”:

The Census Bureau pegs the poverty rate among blacks at 35 percent and among whites at 13 percent… A statistic that one doesn’t hear much about is that the poverty rate among black married families has been in the single digits for more than two decades, currently at 8 percent. For married white families, it’s 5 percent.

Instead of contextualizing existing disparities, emulate the UNC doctors who make broad claims about “systemic racism and its harmful effects on communities of color.”  Notice the correlation between this genuine DEI paper and Lindsay’s satirical, “little has been done to remedy racial disparities in a healthcare system that produces so many health inequities and perpetuates so much harm…”

Blaming racism defines a believable DEI paper.  The following statements — the first from the authentic commentary, the second from Lindsay’s satire — are indistinguishable: “it is critical both to ‘put racism on the agenda’ by naming it as a powerful force,” and “racism is now, finally in just the last year, being named as one of the biggest public health threats in the world…” 

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3.  Pretend DEI is a novel initiative when it’s merely a regurgitation of redistributionist socialist ideology.

To create demand for DEI literature, suggest DEI initiatives are new and under-published.  UNC expertly engages this strategy, contending a “notable lack of published research on how health care organizations address diversity, equity, and inclusion.”  In the real world, papers about workplace DEI increased 6-fold between 2015 and 2021. 

Lindsay explains DEI as an “installation of communist political officers for the goal of establishing socialism under a neo-Marxist identity politics mechanism.”  Equity is a redistribution of resources according to the oppressed; Diversity identifies those officers who will install socialist policy; Inclusion means only those who support Equity will have a say — everyone else will be cancelled.  It’s no coincidence a physician-author of the UNC paper honors communist and former Black Panther, Angela Davis, on her personal Twitter banner.

4. Ask a pretentious question about racism.

Ask a question about racism to imply a superior philosophical and moral perspective.  The published medical paper queried how racism operates at UNC Health, indicating that a new standard of health care ethics is needed.  In his satirical draft, Lindsay asks, “We must also ask what it would mean to reimagine medical ethics in a way that advances medicine toward racial justice and equity….”  

5. Incorporate vague words that sound important.

To elevate a paper’s standing in the DEI community, embrace words of at least three syllables with broad meanings.  “Perpetuates inequities” is one example.  Others include: structural, implicit, disparities, conversation, reimagine, liberates, systemic, equitable, and practices.  Stringing together several shorter generic words is commendable as well.  The UNC medical paper reads, “…perspectives on the structures, policies, practices, norms, and values that create and perpetuate structural inequities.”  By ignoring George Orwell’s advice on “pretentious diction” or “meaningless words,” the UNC authors advance their paper to the just-about-mediocre category required for DEI publication.

These five steps will have you well on your way to writing a DEI paper.  For the body of the work, take Lindsay’s advice:

Notice how we say “[CITE SOME STATISTICS]” because the game in Woke “scholarship” is just to find stuff that supports whatever you wanted to say anyway so it sounds authoritative. We then problematize origins and call them racist.

After finding convenient statistics, discuss “systems rooted in whiteness” and attack objectivity.  Cite the UNC School of Medicine and Health Sciences endorsed reference, “White Supremacy Culture,” by antiracist activist Tema Okun, which designates individualism, perfectionism, a sense of urgency, and objectivity as representative of “white supremacy culture.”

Finally, advocate unconscious bias training to eradicate racism.  UNC doctors acknowledge this solution four times in one table and suggest training all 33,000 employees so they can hold each other accountable.  The British government banned unconscious bias instruction for civil servants, noting the lack of positive results and citing, “Instructions to suppress stereotypes may not only activate and reinforce unhelpful stereotypes, they may provoke negative reactions and actually make people exacerbate their biases.”

Your DEI paper is now ready for submission.  If a reviewer critiques your paper by pointing to the British bias training ban, tell him not to worry: England is about to be cancelled. Doesn’t the reviewer know that Pentagon climate change experts predicted that England will become as permanently cold as Siberia any day now? Guess he flunked his medical school climate justice class.

Image: Quinn Dombrowski

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