An influential 2020 paper in PNAS claimed to prove that “racial concordance” saves black newborns: in its telling, black babies were far more likely to die when treated by white physicians, but their mortality “penalty” dropped by more than half when a black doctor took charge. Corporate media and medical elites instantly weaponized the finding, turning it into years of headlines and DEI training asserting that white doctors are inherently dangerous to black infants and that the solution is race‑matching in medicine.
Behind the scenes, the data told a very different story about white babies. In draft tables that never made it into print, the authors reported that white newborns actually died more often when attended by black physicians than by white physicians, with an excess on the order of dozens of additional deaths per 100,000 births.
Internal margin notes from lead author Brad Greenwood explicitly flagged this as a threat to the messaging, insisting that the team “not focus” on the white‑infant result because they were “telling the story from the perspective of black infants” and the full table “undermines the narrative.” The numbers that made white doctors look bad became the centerpiece of a national morality play, while the numbers that suggested elevated risk for white newborns under black doctors were simply deleted.
Re‑analysis has since blown apart the scientific pretensions of the original work. Economists George Borjas and Connor VerBruggen showed that in Florida’s hospital system, black physicians disproportionately handled healthier, normal‑birth‑weight black babies, while white physicians disproportionately handled the very‑low‑birth‑weight black infants with sky‑high baseline mortality.
Once that selection effect is properly modeled, the supposed racial‑concordance miracle for black infants shrinks dramatically or disappears, revealing that the headline “58 percent reduction” owed more to omitted variables than medical racism. Yet the buried draft numbers still imply a one‑sided concordance effect: when the data are sliced the other way, white babies come out worse under black doctors, a fact the authors chose to hide rather than explain.
Despite these revelations, the institutions that leaned hardest on the study have not backed away from its ideological payoff. The paper helped justify DEI bureaucracies and race‑matching schemes throughout academia and health‑care, from medical‑school admissions to hospital staffing, all premised on the accusation that white physicians harbor lethal bias.
Even as follow‑up work and mainstream outlets quietly admit that the original “white doctors kill black babies” narrative was a total lie, there is near‑total silence about the mirror‑image risk the same data show for white infants under black physicians. The result is a system where race is treated as both diagnosis and cure, and where a small but real excess of white‑baby deaths can be treated as acceptable collateral so long as it serves the right story.