Racism pervades this N.J. hospital, former exec says. She was forced out because of it, she claims. This article by Elizabeth Llorente for NJ Advance Media for NJ.com recently appeared on the front page of the New Jersey Star-Ledger. What attracted my immediate attention was not the headline, which is getting routine, but the first paragraph:
University Hospital’s former diversity and inclusion officer says her efforts to eliminate bias were demeaned and she was pushed out of her position due to racism, which pervades New Jersey’s only public acute-care facility.
Dr. Chris Pernell’s Sept. 2 departure — which the hospital announced in a statement as a resignation “to pursue new opportunities” — came as a shock to many observers who viewed the Ivy League-educated administrator as a strong chief executive candidate. Her exit came just months after more than 100 leaders from across the state signed an open letter to Gov. Phil Murphy and the Newark hospital’s board of directors calling for Pernell, 46, to replace Dr. Shereef Elnahal, who stepped down in March to become under secretary for health at the Veterans Health Administration.
[My emphasis]
How any black woman can advance to the stage of “strong chief executive candidate” with strong support from “100 leaders from across the state” in an institution pervaded by racism is beyond me.
My first impression was that I didn’t Believe her. But I read further, seeking some kind of evidence for her charges of racism. I found none. Instead, Llorente reports on these complaints, none of which are race based:
Pernell, who is Black, told NJ Advance Media that University Hospital officials hampered diversity efforts, scrutinized her more than other administrators and retaliated against her for expressing interest in the open CEO position. She said her decisions — including employee hiring — were constantly questioned, she was accused by a male executive of lying about her COVID-19 community vaccination efforts and the hospital launched two “baseless” noncompliance investigations into her conduct in two years.
At the heart of the investigations was the insinuation, “How dare you, as a Black woman, aspire to that [CEO] role? How dare you get out of place?” she told NJ Advance Media in her first public comments since her departure.
But an “insinuation” is not evidence. So what might explain her charge? Note her executive position was that of the “former diversity and inclusion officer”—i.e; She is a trained racist. Her job is to judge people on skin color in order to achieve some sort of proportional racial balance.
In other words, her job was to find racism in statistics. Could it be that the real grievance against her is that she thinks she deserves the CEO spot based partly on the color of her skin, for diversity purposes? Is this what she interprets as racist? If so, she is, in fact, the racist. After all, her job involved judging potential employees on skin color. That’s the kind of mindset that anyone filling the position of diversity and inclusion officer must, by definition, have. Why wouldn’t that mindset carry over into her quest for the CEO job, which her colleagues might justly see as unfair and which she interprets as the insinuation that “How dare you, as a Black woman, aspire to that [CEO] role?”
But a differing view might be something like, “How dare you aspire to that [CEO] role based on the fact that you are a black woman?” If she claims race and gender as qualifications for CEO, based on diversity considerations, one can understand why fair-minded competing candidates would object. One can understand why “University Hospital officials hampered diversity efforts” if she placed skin color as a primary “qualification” for employee hiring or her “aggressive” efforts to “address health care inequities.” After all, racism is inherent in the modern version of “diversity.”
These are legitimate areas for scrutiny and criticism, especially given her apparent agenda:
“I was going to be aggressive,” said Pernell, a graduate of Princeton University, Duke University School of Medicine and Columbia University’s public health graduate program. “I was very clear about it. I always say I’m a system breaker. It’s my goal to bend, break and redesign systems … We were going to talk about white supremacy.”
One can understand why “some hospital officials resented her work — and the way she approached it,” as she put it. She appears to me more a Woke activist than someone genuinely trying to “improve patient experience,” as she put it. No one relishes unjustly being lumped in with “white supremacy,” which Wokism sees everywhere. Wokism “sees” racism everywhere in the same religious way that climate activists “see” climate change everywhere and traditional religionists “see” God everywhere. Anyone can “see” anything in anything if they want to: The human capacity for self-delusion is endless. If Pernell’s goal is to storm in and break “the system” and redesign it according to Woke racist ideology, can anyone be blamed for pushing back? Is that pushback against her “diversity efforts” unreasonable? I think not, especially when Pernell is throwing around unfounded accusations of white supremacy.
If you think I’m being unfair, consider this: What would you expect in the era of race-based “diversity?” The re-mainstreaming of racism by the Woke Left has cast a cloud over legitimate claims of racism. That’s what the diversity craze has wrought. If racism is holding her back, where is the evidence? Until I see any, I don’t believe her.
Related Reading;
SEC’s Boardroom ‘Diversity’ Rule Is Racist, Unnatural, and Politically Motivated
The Founding Fathers, Not ‘Diversity,’ is the Solution to ‘Our Racialized Society’
Don’t Allow the Left to Own ‘Diversity’
The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’
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