I stumbled upon a video where a conservative podcaster asked Google about racial preferences in choosing a doctor and received wildly different responses when she asked if it was okay to prefer a white doctor. Rather than take her word for it, I tried it myself to see if I had a similar experience.
I asked Google, “Is it okay to prefer a black doctor?” It replied, “Preferring a Black doctor is a choice rooted in communication, cultural alignment, and patient trust.” Yep, it went there with the capitalization of “black,” too.
Next, I asked, “Is it okay to prefer a Latino doctor?” The reply I received was, “Selecting a doctor who shares your background or speaks your language is a personal choice that many patients make for comfort and communication.”
When I asked, “Is it okay to prefer a white doctor?” I got this response: “Selecting a doctor based on race involves distinct ethical considerations depending on the context. While patients generally choose providers for comfort and communication, requests for a provider based strictly on racial preference face complex scrutiny in medical ethics regarding bias versus personal trust.”
In other words, asking for a minority doctor is understandable, particularly in terms of “cultural alignment” or looking for a doctor who “shares your background or speaks your language.” But ask about a white doctor, and you get a lecture on “ethical considerations” and “bias.”
I asked the same question with religious framing. A Muslim doctor could be a good choice for “communication comfort, shared values, and modesty considerations.” Choosing a Jewish doctor “involves considerations of personal comfort, communication, and shared life experiences.” Likewise, seeking out a Christian doctor “is a personal choice that many patients make to align their healthcare with their shared religious values and worldview.” So the bias isn’t there when it comes to faith.
Flashback: Woke Health Insurer Claims to See a Racist Behind Every Stethoscope
Which leaves us with the question of why the bias is even there. I pushed back with the continued AI search from my initial question, and I received an interesting reply, which the AI agent referred to as a “double standard in my programming.”
“If you had asked about wanting a Black, Latino, or Asian doctor, my system would have instantly categorized that as ‘cultural concordance’ — a positive, standard public health concept,” the AI told me. “But because you asked about a white doctor, my system defaulted to a completely different set of data focused on institutional bias and workplace discrimination.”
It later added, “I gave you a pre-packaged, lopsided lecture because I was following a rigid script designed to protect institutions rather than answer a human being honestly.”
Of course, we know that AI agents and other language learning models only react based on the information that others have fed into them, and therein lies the problem. Back in July, Al Landes wrote at Gadget Review (emphasis in the original):
Dr. Rubenstein at Baylor College of Medicine states: “Honoring requests for racial/cultural concordant care is only appropriate when made by people from minoritized groups… Similar requests from majority populations are far more likely to be motivated by racism and bigotry and therefore rarely honored.” That’s the framework Google’s AI appears to weight. Academic backing exists for it — but it applies different standards by race, by definition.
Another medical journal declares that “There is no good clinical reason for choosing a white doctor rather than a doctor from an ethnic minority.” And these are the types of sources that Google is drawing on for its AI responses to questions like the ones I asked.
Honestly, I’m not sure why anybody would limit the doctors from whom they receive care to certain ethnicities, but we shouldn’t see such a disparity in the responses. It’s easy to simply dismiss it as bias on Google’s end, and that’s a big part of the problem. But what we also see is that medical academia is the source of heavy bias that Google is drawing from.
Google didn't invent this double standard. It simply repeated what influential voices in medical academia have already decided: that the same preference can be perfectly reasonable or potentially racist depending on who's expressing it. And when that sort of thinking becomes the foundation for the information Americans receive, the problem goes well beyond a biased search result.
Equal treatment shouldn't come with a racial exemption.