To this day, many medical schools uphold medical racism by continuing to present race as a biological facet of a person, rather than a socially, politically constructed description. 

The process of biologizing race is derived from an underlying framework of race as a genetic proxy to understanding how diseases manifest in the human body. Race in America arose to an extent based on the general geographical region from which one’s ancestors originated. However, in 2002, a Stanford study concluded that only approximately 7.4% of alleles are specific to vast geographical regions, and such region-specific alleles appear at a median frequency of only 1% in the population from that region. Race in America has never traced back to specific enough geographical regions to accurately indicate genetic ancestry. This finding and others suggest that using race — which has also been largely influenced by America's socio-political history from the time of its inception — as a genetic proxy is detrimental to evidence-based practice and establishing diagnoses. 

Medical students have historically been taught to use these classifications — however politically constructed and baselessly applied — in patient care, thereby obscuring symptoms and the science behind them, perpetuating the racism that spurred these fallacies of “biological difference” in the first place. We may then use race to the point that we begin to state a patient’s race as a “pertinent positive” characteristic when convincing our attending physicians of a certain diagnosis or course of treatment. For example, studies have shown that medical students and professionals often perceive that black patients have biologically thicker skin and feel less pain than their white counterparts, a conclusion — enabled by our profession’s obfuscation of race as a social construct — that can lead to less aggressive treatment provided to black patients and poorer health outcomes. Ultimately, teaching race as a biological description perpetuates medical racism. 

In November of 2019, the USMLE released a statement acknowledging race as a social construct and announcing their plan to conduct a 3-4 year review of licensing exams in order to remove racial bias from questions. 

Now, we are calling on the LCME to release an explicit statement of commitment to make following accreditation requirements of medical schools: 

1. Explicitly mandate the removal of race-based medicine in pre-clinical and clinical curriculum. This includes, but is not limited to, race-based differences in spirometry calculations, GFR calculations, and treatment recommendations for ACE-inhibitors and beta blockers. 
2. Explicitly mandate the teaching of race as a social construct in medical schools, as well as the impacts of systemic racism on health. This includes emphasizing race as a social construct when students are taught epidemiological race-based statistics about certain diseases. 
3. Explicitly mandate the removal of race from oral presentations in clinical years. 

We also call on the NBME to expedite the review of USMLE questions to remove racial bias by removing all mentions of race in USMLE questions and vignettes, replacing them with more comprehensive descriptors and characteristics fully supported by evidence and without perpetuating racialized medicine. This must be complete this year; another 3-4 years of upholding medical racism is unacceptable. To further this demand, please support the call to action put out by SNMA National here. 

These changes are crucial to creating actively anti-racist medical curricula in training future medical professionals. It is not enough to have bias training and interracial dialogues if we are being taught to be racist in our science curriculum. 

To all medical students: we encourage you to spread this petition among your fellow classmates and peers at other medical schools, as well as urge your deans to both consider these actions for your own medical school and advocate on your behalf directly to the LCME, AAMC & NBME in support of these demands.