Exclusive — Rep. Andy Harris M.D.: Johns Hopkins Must Fire Radical Chief Diversity Officer

Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD), who earned undergraduate and medical degrees at Johns Hopkins University and worked as an anesthesiologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital for three decades, called for the hospital to fire its radical Chief Diversity Officer in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News Daily.

Dr. Sherita Hill Golden, in a “monthly diversity digest” emailed to staff, accused males, whites, Christians, and even able-bodied people – among many others – of possessing “unearned” privileges that oppress others “regardless of their stated intent.”

“Privilege is characteristically invisible to people who have it. People in dominant groups often believe they have earned the privileges they enjoy or that everyone could have access to these privileges if only they worked to earn them,” she wrote, assigning “privilege” as the “Diversity Word of the Month.”

Harris believes Golden must go.

“Maybe I’m old fashioned,” he told Breitbart News. “I think that you ought to [practice medicine] based on science not on diversity, that you shouldn’t be prejudiced against anyone or discriminate against anyone or even suggest discrimination against anyone. But she obviously feels differently. And I think that that’s just incompatible, honestly, with the laws of the United States.”

Golden issued a statement after the backlash retracting her definition of privilege, although she did not offer an alternative definition.

“The newsletter included a definition of the word privilege which, upon reflection, I deeply regret,” she wrote in a memo obtained by the Daily Mail, which called the language of the definition “overly simplistic and poorly worded.”

“I retract and disavow the definition I shared and I am sorry,” it read.

Harris isn’t buying a sudden change of heart.

“Look, you can’t walk back your statement,” he said. “You made the statement, that’s what you truly believe. What we’re trying to find out, we’re trying to deal with the leadership at Hopkins Medicine, [to determine] if that’s in fact what the leadership at Hopkins Medicine believes.

“It’s completely unacceptable. There’s no proper outcome from this except her being fired by Johns Hopkins, just like Dr. Gay was fired from Harvard.”

Harvard President Claudine Gay recently resigned after immense backlash following antisemitism scandals at the Ivy League university and a disastrous congressional testimony in which she excused calls for genocide of Jewish people, as well as subsequent plagiarism allegations against her being unearthed.

Harris, whose extensive career at the hospital, included serving as chief of obstetric anesthesiology, is concerned that a misplaced focus on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) will harm patient care.

“This is an issue that’s frequently discussed by a lot of physicians in the Republican Conference here in the House,” he said. “It’s dangerous to American medicine and American healthcare when you take your emphasis off of healthcare and off the science and put it on something like diversity.”

Harris continued, “We’re very fearful that the policies in many of our medical schools and in many of our hospitals, many of our institutions, are going to lead to a dangerous situation in America where we no longer make healthcare decisions based on real science. We make them based on really arbitrary things, such as definitions of privilege.”

But Harris is encouraged that backlash from American citizens is bearing fruit.

“The outcome of what happened at Harvard is that even the progressives are probably not really willing to go to the mat for this. I think a number of them realize that this is way out of bounds, that when you’re talking about academics, or you’re talking about healthcare, there should be merits that we’re talking about. Especially with healthcare, it should be science.”

“I think that there is a time coming very soon, where the pushback against DEI and chief diversity officers is going to be meaningful.”

Despite the uproar against DEI policies, Harris is concerned that damage has already been inflicted upon the American healthcare system.

“I think the quality of your medical students is probably being affected, the quality of the trainees coming out of these institutions, and again, I think you could still put this genie back in the bottle, but it has to be done now. And the first step, in this case, has to be the firing of the Chief Diversity Officer for what should be unacceptable behavior in society that prides itself on non-discrimination.”

Harris believes Golden’s celebration of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy is ironic because he would not support her radical opinions on privilege or DEI initiatives.

“Listing race as one of the things that you should consider people on or judge people on, which is really what was her whole article on privileges was about, that you should judge people based on their race, is something completely antithetical to Martin Luther King. I hope Hopkins is ashamed of what this person has done.”

Harris’s experience as a medical doctor includes service in the Navy Medical Corps and the U.S. Naval Reserve as a lieutenant commander on active duty during Operation Desert Storm. He also served as commanding officer for the Johns Hopkins Naval Reserve Medical Unit from 1989 to 1992.

Bradley Jaye is a Capitol Hill Correspondent for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter at @BradleyAJaye.