Cincinnati Children’s is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for its diversity-related training programs and scholarships.
The complaint was filed by Milwaukee-based conservative law firm Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, or WILL, which named the hospital’s William K. Schubert Minority Nursing Scholarship, Jean Turner Minority Scholarship for Medical Imaging Technology, Biomedical Research Internship for Minority Students and Administrative Fellowship program in its federal complaint against the hospital in December.
According to WILL, these programs violate the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964 because they discriminate against white students on the basis of their race.
White doctors make up the majority of the profession, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges’ physician workforce dashboard, with 57% of all active physicians in the U.S. identifying as white in 2022.
Cincinnati Children’s did not respond to The Enquirer’s request for comment.
Some law firms say they’ve seen a rise in claims alleging reverse discrimination, where members of a majority group such as white people or men say they’ve experienced discrimination on the basis of race or sex.
While those claims have increased since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the use of affirmative action in college admissions in 2023, white Americans may believe that they’ve been the target of racial discrimination for much longer.
A famous Harvard Business School study published in 2011 and replicated eight years later found that white Americans believed that while anti-Black bias decreased moderately from the 1950s to the 2010s, anti-white bias increased over the same period.
“That whites now believe that anti-white bias is more prevalent than anti-Black bias has clear implications for public policy debates and behavioral science research in the years to come,” predicted the authors of the 2011 study.
Still, the belief appears to be concentrated among a minority: in 2019, a Pew Research survey found that while 14% of white American adults believed that being white in America hurts one’s ability to get ahead, 56% disagreed.
