The Leftist Justification for Racial Discrimination Is Built on Lies

By Jay P. Greene

Tuesday, March 31, 2026

 

Three years after the Supreme Court ended racial discrimination in college admissions, the left is working hard to undermine that clear and emphatic ruling. Well-funded liberal institutions are laying the groundwork for future legal challenges that carve out areas where they want racial discrimination to continue — especially in hiring. Conservatives need to wake up to this threat and push back hard, not least because the left’s latest campaign to undermine the Constitution and American values is built on a foundation of lies.

 

The left’s plan involves manufacturing the intellectual ammunition to aid its arguments in the courts and the broader culture. A prime example is a recent study by two prominent leftists — including the primary author of Obamacare — which argues that black Americans need black doctors to attain the best health outcomes. The implication is clear: Medical providers should be allowed to hire based on race, because patient health depends on it. And you can almost hear the leading question: Are judges so obsessed with the Constitution that they’re willing to let black people die?

 

The left has tried such tactics before. The Association of American Medical Colleges and 45 other health-care groups made a similar claim in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the 2023 Supreme Court case striking down affirmative action as unconstitutional racial discrimination. Undeterred, the left is deploying the same playbook in the event that the ideological composition of the high court and the lower courts changes.

 

But the reality is that these leftist groups are manipulating evidence — and worse, making some of it up. The AAMC and those 45 health-care groups are a case in point. Their entire argument rests on four studies that supposedly show that matching patients and doctors by race produces better results. But I have painstakingly reviewed each study and found that none of them ask — much less answer — the question of whether patients do better when their doctors share their skin color. Put simply, they don’t prove what medical organizations say they prove.

 

Let that sink in. Some of the country’s most prominent medical groups either didn’t read the studies they cite, or they did read them and still decided to concoct their own false and unevidenced conclusions. Neither choice speaks well of them. All it shows is that leftists are so dead set on defending racial discrimination that they don’t care about the facts.

 

To see how these groups are blatantly elevating activism over evidence, consider just one of the studies they wrongly cite. The researchers asked medical students and residents to rate the pain of hypothetical black and white patients. They also had to answer questions about medical differences between the two races, such as whether “Blacks’ nerve endings are less sensitive than whites” or whether “Blacks’ skin is thicker than whites.” The study’s supposedly groundbreaking “finding” was that white participants accepted false statements about medical differences between black and white patients about 12 percent of the time.

 

That’s certainly concerning — but the authors cover up an even more concerning fact.

 

Non-white medical students and residents were actually 30 percent more likely to believe false statements about racial differences. In other words, the study’s findings completely undercut its premise, because the facts suggest that non-white trainees are more likely to mistreat black patients. Tellingly, the study’s authors excluded that finding from the study; I discovered it by digging into their publicly released data. They knew exactly what they were hiding.

 

Ultimately, the study merely demonstrates that medical students of all races largely shed any false beliefs that they hold as they continue their training. That’s what you’d expect — education enlightens the mind. But that’s completely different from how medical organizations characterize the study. They say it proves that black doctors provide better care to black patients, yet the study never asked that question. Furthermore, at no point did the researchers examine the care provided by fully licensed physicians to actual patients — or even hypothetical ones. In their claims about the study, prominent medical groups are lying — both to federal judges and the broader public.

 

This is professional malfeasance of the highest order — and it’s coming from organizations that say Americans should trust them. But like so many institutions that have been captured by the left, they’re deliberately abusing the public’s trust. They’ve put ideology ahead of evidence and politics above professional excellence. Even worse, they’ve sacrificed their integrity for the sake of supporting something as immoral and illegal as racial discrimination.

 

This latest leftist campaign is guaranteed to head to the courts. Lower court judges will be asked to ignore the Supreme Court’s logic in its 2023 ban on discriminatory admissions and green-light continued discrimination in areas like hiring, simply because of the supposed positive impact such discrimination has. But that’s not just wrong as a matter of law — it has no basis in science or reality. And the leftists behind this racist campaign know it.