Keynote Speaker

Dr. Saleem Razack

Medical Education is based upon white-supremacist knowledge systems which pervade all aspects learning from the classroom to the bedside.  Many have been brought to harm by racist medical practices.  To change such practices will require a critical examination of formal, informal and hidden curricula within medical education. 
The author hopes to engage the audience in a discussion of the white supremacist and otherwise discriminatory knowledge systems of medical education, which have expressed themselves in troubling ways, from the deep and uneasy relationship between medical education and eugenics to unjust systems of health care, to give two examples.  Secondly, the presenter would like to engage the audience a critical examination of social constructs of professionalism in medicine and how these might be made more explicitly anti-racist and anti-oppressive.  Thirdly, we will examine the concepts of “equity”, “diversity”, “inclusion”, “merit”, and related ideas as complex multi-voiced phenomena.  Throughout the discussion, participants will be encouraged to move seamlessly through theory and praxis and will be asked to imagine what anti-racist medical education might look like.