The American College of Surgeons is trying to expunge the term DEI from antiracism and critical race theory initiatives. An attempted rebranding was inevitable, given how rapidly the term and its associated programs have fallen out of favor. Universities, corporations, and institutions of all kinds are eagerly rechristening, if not dismantling, their DEI departments and laying off their DEI administrators.
The new name of the game is “Inclusive Excellence.” Like “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” it has a nice ring to it and even seems to signal a return to a focus on merit. This is not the case. Search the ACS website for the Office of Diversity, and you’ll be redirected to the Office of Inclusive Excellence. The ACS has renamed its DEI Toolkit, introduced in December 2023, the ACS Inclusive Excellence Resource and Implementation Toolkit.
A perusal of the materials reveals that little if anything has changed in the program’s content and focus. It continues to promote the discredited Implicit Association Test as a measure of one’s implicit bias. It still claims that achieving proportionate representation of identity groups somehow makes organizations better. It adopts the same underlying DEI premise: that disparities of representation always indicate discrimination.
The new toolkit retains, without modification, perhaps the most repellent aspect of DEI—the theory of racial concordance in medicine. This concept states that patients receive better care and obtain better outcomes from surgeons of the same race. The toolkit still cites a discredited study purporting to show that black babies have better survival odds if the doctor who cares for them is black. This is a slap in the face of all physicians, who do their utmost for every patient, regardless of race.
If the ACS really wants to show that it is making meaningful changes, it could do so by encouraging robust debate about DEI, Inclusive Excellence, or any other name it may go by. Instead, it has chosen to ban dissenters from its forums.
The shift to “inclusive excellence” is a perfect example of trying to put lipstick on a pig. No matter how thickly you apply it, it remains a pig.
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