Racial Justice Report Card
A Student-written Report
The Racial Justice Report Card (RJRC) assesses 14 areas of academic medical centers, including diversity, curriculum, climate, treatment of workers, policing, research protocols, and racial integration of clinical care sites.
Today, over 25 medical schools have RJRCs, including Harvard, Columbia, Duke, UCSF, UC Davis, and Johns Hopkins University.
The original RJRC was created by the White Coats for Black Lives (WC4BL) national working group in 2018 and recruited medical schools across the country to gather data and produce a report. The Racial Justice Report Card is a WC4BL initiative that seeks to articulate specific ways in which academic medical centers can promote anti-racism, facilitate efforts to organize change at the academic medical center, and ensure public accountability for promoting anti-racist medical practices.
About the Racial Justice Report Card
- 25+ medical schools utilize the RJRC evaluation, as of 2020
- Gives tangible ways for medical schools to improve and to become more anti-racist
- 15 metrics (at medical school, residency, and hospital level) to evaluate:
- Policing and prison abolition
- Redistribution of wealth, health and education to BIPOC communities
- BIPOC community control and self determination
- Medical school campuses remained silent and detached.
- Medicine is not immune to the racism
- WC4BL created on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 2015
- DGSOM student leaders started a WC4BL chapter in 2015, but this was halted as there was no faculty support to help advance agenda
- Eliminate racism in the practice of medicine.
- Recognize racism as a threat to the health and well-being of communities of color.
- Create a safe space for students to engage in conversations surrounding racial and social justice in medicine within medical school.
- Promote racial justice in DGSOM education by advocating for the representation and visibility of traditionally underrepresented students at the DGSOM MD program.
Goal of WC4BL
Ultimately, WC4BL hopes that the Racial Justice Report Card will highlight best practices and encourage academic medical centers to direct their considerable power and resources toward addressing the needs of our patients and colleagues of color.
RJRC Example Metrics
These are sample medical school metrics for recruitment and admissions.
- In alignment with the national Ban the Box movement, applicants to medical school are not asked to disclose whether or not they have a history of criminal punishment system involvement.
- Undocumented students are encouraged to apply to the medical school, and have access to institutional grants and loans to cover the full cost of attendance.
- Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students and faculty are overrepresented in the medical school class and faculty at all levels by at least a factor of two relative to their share of the U.S. population
- At least 40% of the incoming medical students received or would have been eligible to receive Pell grants.
- Students of color who participate in recruitment and other admissions activities are compensated for their time at a rate at least equal to the local living wage.
- The medical school publishes an annual report on the race and gender distribution of financial aid funds.
- Black, Indigenous, or Latinx alumni of local public schools comprise at least 10% of enrolled medical students.
- All applicants participate in interviews with local BIPOC local leaders, who are compensated at a rate equal to or greater than the local living wage.