I hate Critical Race Theory and all similar attempts to make race all-important. But rather discussing the problem from an academic standpoint, let me give you my personal reason.
When I was a medical student back in the Jurassic Era, I began my third year at the old San Francisco County Hospital’s emergency ward. One of my first patients was a Latino man in his early 20s. He had abdominal pain. The intern and I thought he had appendicitis, so I called a surgical resident.
He was a Japanese American named Al Mineta. He barely spoke to me, a lowly student. But watching him, I learned an invaluable lesson: how to evaluate an acute abdomen. The patient was taken to the operating room and his appendix removed with no problems. I wandered into the next operating room, hoping to learn something. I did.
The patient was covered in sterile drapes, and the anesthesiologist kept him alive behind a partition. The chief resident was operating, so I knew it was a difficult case. I watched him handling the bowels and examining the liver. I was there for several minutes before I noticed the patient’s hand protruding from the drape. He was Black. I had been observing the man’s internal organs for some time without learning his race.
It struck me that we waste so much valuable time and effort arguing about the color of the outer few millimeters of skin, while ignoring all the rest of the person, physical, psychological, and spiritual. What a waste. What stupidity. What an insult to the founders, who taught us that all people are created equal. What an insult to the Creator, who formed all of us in His image.
Whenever I hear moral idiots proclaim the overriding importance of race, I think about that patient. I never knew his name, and I can’t recall his illness. But he taught me a lesson that helped me all my life: The color of the outer few millimeters of skin is the least important characteristic of a human being. Those who obsess about it are wasting their time and ours. We have serious problems to deal with, and we do not need to be distracted by divisive, destructive trivia.
