We need more truth, not less. In our history books. In our exhibits. In our medical journals.

Erasing race from the narrative won’t solve inequality. It just ensures we keep repeating it.

When leaders target institutions that tell the truth about race, they’re not restoring sanity—they’re making it harder to fight injustice in every sector, including healthcare.

Because once people see the full picture, the demand for change becomes undeniable.

Museums like the Smithsonian connect the dots between policy, history, and lived experience. They show how racism has shaped everything from medical research to public health outcomes.

Calling that “ideology” is a way to silence truth.

Even though… race is a human invention.

It’s not a biological reality—it’s a social construct built to justify inequality. But in medicine, we still treat it like biology. That’s how you get things like different diagnostic algorithms based on race.

Yet this order calls out Smithsonian exhibits like “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture” for stating that societies (including the U.S.) have used race to uphold power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.

It criticizes the exhibit for saying “Race is a social construct.”

Race-based medicine isn’t just a relic of the past—it’s a practice that still affects patients every day:

From BMI, to eGFR calculations to spirometry corrections, race has been falsely coded into science as a biological truth rather than a social construct.

This isn’t just about museums. It’s about erasing the structural realities that shape American life—especially in healthcare.

If we can’t talk about race in history, how can we talk about it in medicine? How do we confront the roots of race-based medicine?