Emily Cathey, COM ‘23
As I sat down to write this reflection on racism and COVID, I could not help but wonder how I am even remotely qualified to write this. In fact, I have never felt more unqualified to write something. Sure, I have done some research. I could easily quote the statistics from the CDC indicating that Black and Latinx individuals are about 4.7 times, and Native American individuals are 5.3 times, more likely to be hospitalized due to COVID-19 than non-Hispanic white people. I could discuss the systematic racism that permeates healthcare. The fact that minorities are more likely to have comorbidities and are less likely to have access to healthcare. Or I could write about how there are more minorities in “essential” jobs, leading to more COVID exposure, or even about the pervasive mistrust of healthcare, for good reason, stemming from such horrors as the Tuskegee Experiment (https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/index.html). The correlation between race and heath care disparities, particularly within COVID-19, is readily apparent.
Learning about the issues at hand and the history of systemic racism in medicine is absolutely vital. Yet, being able to recite academic information from journals and newspaper articles hardly makes me qualified to discuss racism and COVID. In truth, I will never fully understand systemic racism, particularly during COVID. I will never fully understand what it is like to be living in the midst of a global pandemic with almost 200,000 deaths in the United States alone, at an increased risk of serious illness merely because of my race, and having to fight for my life to matter instead of receiving support. Because of this, I simply feel unqualified. I imagine these feelings of inadequacy to discuss matters of race are felt by many reading this.
Nonetheless, feeling unqualified is not an acceptable excuse for avoiding these discussions. We can no longer sit on the sidelines and refuse to leave our comfort zones. Feeling unqualified and uneducated as to matters of race is, however, a reason to continue to learn, to continue to listen, and to continue to improve every day. This is how the idea for bringing Malone Mukwende, the British medical student and author of Mind the Gap: A Handbook of Clinical Signs on Black and Brown Skin to talk with UNE COM students over Zoom came about. The goal of this was two-fold. The first was to improve clinical knowledge with the content in the handbook. The second was to demonstrate that we, as medical students, have a unique responsibility to make a difference in society. Malone saw a gap in education and clinical practice, and rather than waiting for change, he decided to do something about it. We may be at the beginning of our training, but like Malone, we can still advocate, we can still make a difference and fight for equity.
In many respects, his talk was extremely powerful. He discussed the sometimes-fatal consequences of being unable to recognize certain symptoms on black and brown skin, along with his motivations for writing the book. He discussed his successes and the barriers he faced while researching. Nearly every word he said was captivating and meaningful. However, one particular aspect of Malone’s talk stuck with me. While noting that he is hardly the first person to advocate for diversity in curriculum, he emphasized that he is advocating at a unique time. Systemic racism in healthcare and society, lack of diversity in medical education, and health inequities are not new. They have been around longer than the United States has been a country. The only difference is that in the past, these injustices were easier to ignore. COVID-19 and police brutality have highlighted these issues and brought them to the forefront of everyone’s attention. What remains to be asked is whether we, as medical students and healthcare professionals around the country, will continue to remain in our comfort zones or will we, like Malone, choose to fight for change? <>