For Doctors of Color, Microaggressions Are All Too Familiar

When Dr. Onyeka Otugo was doing her training in emergency medicine, in Cleveland and Chicago, she was often mistaken for a janitor or food services worker even after introducing herself as a doctor. She realized early on that her white male counterparts were not experiencing similar mix-ups.

The field of medicine has long skewed white and male. Only 5% of the American physician workforce is African American, and roughly 2% are Black women. Emergency medicine is even more predominantly white, with just 3% of physicians identifying as Black. The pipeline is also part of the problem; at American medical schools, just 7% of the student population is now Black.

Discussions about lack of diversity in medicine resurfaced in early August, when the Journal of the American Heart Association retracted a paper that argued against affirmative action initiatives in the field and said that Black and Hispanic trainees were less qualified than their white and Asian counterparts.

Such comments can create an environment of fear for Black women. Otugo recalled overhearing her Black female colleagues in Chicago discuss how they were going to style their hair for their clerkships. Many of them worried that if they wore their hair naturally, instead of straightening it or even changing it to lighter colors, their grades and performance evaluations from white physicians might suffer.

President Trump was right about FAKE NEWS. Yahoo News took away their comment section. Won't allow FREE SPEECH the other way. Imagine that...the MEDIA fights for their right to free speech, but, takes away the PLATFORM for FREE SPEECH from it's audience.

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