To Be Young, A Doctor And Black: Overcoming Racial Barriers In Medical Training BY YUKI NOGUCHI NPR
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r. Danielle Hairston, a psychiatry residency director at Howard University in Washington, D.C., trains and mentors young black doctors. Dr. Danielle Hairston grew up in a family that included many role models of what she refers to as Black excellence. “I had the example of a Black woman pediatrician, so it never occurred to me I couldn’t become a doctor,” says Hairston, who is now the psychiatry residency director at Howard University, where she herself now trains and mentors young Black doctors. Yet, she says, she and her Black colleagues are routinely questioned in the hospitals and clinics where they work about their rightful place in the halls of medicine. They’re questioned entering the physicians’ lounge; in the elevator, one woman accosted Hairston: “Oh, my God, you’re a doctor? You? You?” One of her white colleagues mistook her for a patient’s caregiver. “I don’t even necessarily think that he’s racist,” Hairston says. “It’s just that that’s the bias.” Black Americans make up more than 13% of the U.S. population, yet only 5% of physicians are black. That lack of representation isn’t just a problem within medicine, Hairston notes, but it perpetuates a sense that medical and mental health care is not of — or for — the Black community. As institutions everywhere confront the impacts of racism and inequity in their systems, medicine is not immune. Lack of access to health care isn’t just a problem for Black patients, who continue to face economic, social, and cultural barriers. The gaps are evident in the profession itself. Black physicians remain in a disproportionately small minority. And many African American doctors say that’s because medical training itself alienates
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them, perpetuating those gaps which, in turn, affects the care patients receive. “If you’re ignoring this part of their experience, if you’re not understanding the impact of being Black on them in this country and on their mental health, you’re doing a disservice to them,” says Hairston. “And I don’t know how you can treat them effectively.” Part of the problem — Dr. Danielle Hairston and the potential solution — lies in the pipeline of young talent coming through the U.S. system of medical training. Altha Stewart, who became the first Black president of the American Psychiatric Association, says she considered herself lucky to have Black mentors during her residency training in the late 1970s. They not only helped shepherd her, she says, they taught her about the needs of the African American community, and how the stress of racism affects both physical and mental health. But such peer support remains rare. “I know residents who don’t have that even today, in 2020,” she says. Medical training felt profoundly lonely and isolating for Dr. Anthony Chin-Quee, a Black ear, nose and throat surgeon who finished his training in Detroit four years ago.
