Meet Kenny Xu, the anti-DEI crusader targeting every medical school

The young conservative activist Kenny Xu is not just talking about a revolution.

He’s dead serious about ensuring that Americans are treated by qualified doctors — not those accepted to med schools because of their victim status or the color of their skin, he told The Post.

“Medicine is the one place where everyone agrees DEI should not be a criteria,” Xu, 25, told The Post.

The son of highly educated Chinese immigrants, Xu is determined to end what he sees as dangerous and hypocritical “anti-racism” and woke-ism policies in higher education, especially in medical schools, and bring back academic meritocracy.

He and his campaign group, Color Us United, had their first big win last month when the medical school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill voted to ban diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) statements from hiring and tenure decisions.

He has also lobbied against discrimination against Asian Americans by elite colleges like Harvard.

Now he plans to take his campaign nationwide — at a time when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is targeting all things woke at his state’s public universities.

“Hopefully, we can start this revolution at UNC that can spread across the country,” Xu said from his home in Raleigh, NC.

“Right now we’re living in a very surface-level culture where it’s all about skin color. If you go to a Harvard admissions officer, all they care about is: Are you a woman, are you a man, are you gay? Or do you have a cool story that some college admissions consultant wrote for you? Or are you like that kid who wrote ‘Black Lives Matter’ 100 times for his college essay and got accepted by Stanford?” Xu said.

“Most likely they don’t care about the traits that actually produce value. That’s my crusade — to get people to care about real merit and real value, regardless of surface characteristics like skin color.”

Xu and his three-person organization began their campaign at UNC by lobbying school trustees, many of whom, he said, didn’t even know much about DEI and how embedded it had become at the university and the medical school.

Before Xu came on the scene, the UNC medical school’s Guidelines for Appointment, Promotion and Tenure stated that all applicants seeking to work at the school had to furnish statements involving their “depth and breadth of efforts in each (DEI) area, including but not limited to impact of work, philosophy and style, team-based projects, and mentee interactions.”

After Xu’s campaign, the school’s board of governors voted to ban DEI statements from hiring and tenure decisions.

“Our motto is to advocate for a race-blind, meritocratic America,” Xu said. “Right now we’re using the example of medical schools to show people exactly why DEI ideology is so harmful because it’s something most people on the left, right or center can all agree. They don’t care what the race of their doctor is. They just want the best-qualified doctor.”

Xu said woke admissions policies may backfire on the allegedly marginalized students they are supposed to help.

“Right now we have medical schools like Perelman [at the University of Pennsylvania] saying they’re going to admit any black college applicant who scores a 3.6 GPA and completes two summers of internship at our undergrad institution,” he said. “‘We’re going to admit anybody, and they don’t even have to take the MCAT to get in.’

“Whereas if you’re white or Asian, you have to be at the top 1% of MCAT takers to even be considered. That is the definition of unfairness. And that is the definition of putting the stereotype on the black applicant before he even gets a chance to go out in the real world.”

Xu has been a crusader of sorts since middle school but said his passion began to peak while studying math at Davidson College in North Carolina, when he was often smeared for his Christian and conservative beliefs.

(Despite what he says were near-perfect SAT scores and a 4.4 GPA in high school, Xu was turned down by top-tier schools like Princeton — and he believes it was because he is Asian.)

Xu was blunt in asking for help and funding to fight the DEI policies at UNC’s med school.

“The doctor that treats you should be the most qualified doctor available to you, not the doctor that has received the most amount of social justice training,” he wrote at the time. “Yet that’s exactly what UNC Medical School is doing: replacing vital medical training courses with social justice courses and diminishing the quality of its doctors in the service of a false social justice agenda.”

Xu is known for his first book, 2021’s “An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian-American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy,” and has another, “School of Woke: How Critical Race Theory Infiltrated American Schools and Why We Must Reclaim Them,” due out in August.

For his new book, Xu went to school districts in Loudoun County, Virginia, and Santa Barbara, California, to investigate what he describes as critical race theory that’s been baked into the school system.

“The left denies that critical race theory even exists in schools but this book will totally put that argument to rest,” he said. “I investigated exactly where critical race theory was in the schools and how those principles leak into the classroom and how they’re affecting children.”

Xu is not alone in his fight against woke policies in schools, especially medical schools.

Last year, Stanley Goldfarb, 79, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school, told The Post that new “anti-racism” med school policies are lowering standards, reducing students to the color of their skin and corrupting medicine in general — much to the outrage of his fellow faculty members.

Xu said he tries to offer solutions in his work.

“What the anti-racist will never tell you is, why did they call themselves anti-racist? ‘Oh, well, because we oppose racism.’ I also oppose racism, but I want a merit-based, colorblind society,” he added.

“And these anti-racists, they don’t want a merit-based, colorblind society. They want a society of socialism. They want racial socialists, where race privileges will be doled out at a racially proportionate rate. That’s what they want, but it’s not what I or a lot of other Americans want.”