Researchers Axed Data Point Undermining ‘Narrative’ That White Doctors Are Biased Against Black Babies

A researcher who argued that infant mortality is higher for black newborns with white doctors because of racial bias omitted a variable from the paper that “undermines the narrative,” according to the researcher’s internal notes.

The study forms a keystone of the racial concordance field, which hypothesizes patients are better served by medical providers of the same race, and has served as a rationale for affirmative action. It faces new questions just as universities move to defund their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs or face legal action.

The August 2020 study in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) concluded that the gap in mortality rates between black newborns and white newborns declines by 58% if the black newborns are under the care of black physicians. A possible driver of the phenomenon could include a “spontaneous bias” by white physicians toward the babies, the researchers wrote.

The paper’s most high-profile booster was Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who cited it as evidence for the benefits of affirmative action in her dissent in the 2023 Supreme Court ruling Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which found that universities that considered the race of college applicants had violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

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But the study’s methods have been called into question. A September 2024 replication effort concluded that the original study authors did not statistically control for very low birth weight newborns at the highest risk of dying. Applying that control zeroed out any statistically significant effect of racial concordance on infant mortality.

Now, evidence has emerged that the paper’s lead author buried information in order to tell a tidier story than the one his methods and data originally illustrated.

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The study originally asserted that white babies died less frequently with white doctors.

“White newborns experience 80 deaths per 100,000 births more with a black physician than a white physician, implying a 22% fatality reduction from racial concordance,” an unpublished draft reads.

But the study’s lead author Brad N. Greenwood wrote in the margin: “I’d rather not focus on this. If we’re telling the story from the perspective of saving black infants this undermines the narrative.”

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