How to start a movement

On 1/16 (the day before my latest 25th birthday; I have been 25 years old for over a decade), I recorded a video for the Racial Day of Healing.

I had to admit I was not yet healed from the trauma of Carle Foundation Hospital and their workplace mobbing led by retired locum pediatric surgeon Kerry Bergman, MD, and co-signed by my then practice partner’s silence.

I, of course, have forgiven them because holding on to anger is just “swallowing poison and hoping the other person dies.”

The daily requests in my email from recruiters for Carle Foundation Hospital needing a pediatric surgeon ASAP are painful and ironic. And honestly, I expected to be called out for making a video about healing when I had yet to reach that goal.

It is easy to hide behind my pen because, when I write, there is no emotion. The emotion is that of the reader, like text messages. Even “I love you” can be read as “angry”; the reader gives it tone. But a video is the real me, warts and all (no warts, but I did look tired).

What I did not expect was a troll, a plastic surgeon from AZ, who commented on this on my page. “I have been practicing medicine for 30 years, and I NEVER have (the capitalization is my own) seen a single instance of racial or gender inequality in a private practice or academic setting”.

He (of course, a “he”) then went on to say that perhaps the perceived discrimination was “learned projection.” (What is that?)

He then finished by taking a snippet from Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech about Dr. King’s hope for a colorblind society.

In his training and practice, I wondered if he had managed to leapfrog to an oasis of equity in medicine where gender and race were not factors in advancement and remuneration. If so, this was the path we all should follow, and these were the institutions that should be recognized for their achievement in gender and racial equality.

So, like any good scientist, I did my research. Sadly, it was not difficult to find two of his colleagues on Doximity (a social networking app for medical professionals) who had published articles about gender discrimination in Plastic Surgery.

For him not to have seen a single instance of racial or gender inequality in 30 years meant that either he was a perpetrator or had kept his eyes closed. His colleagues were giving evidence of gender inequality, but he did not acknowledge it and felt empowered enough to challenge others on its existence in a public forum.

This led me to think about active predators like Jeffrey Epstein, whose crimes were first reported to the Palm Beach Police in 2005. He was arrested in 2008 after Federal authorities identified 36 girls, some of these girls were as young as 14 years of age, whom Jeffrey Epstein had sexually assaulted. For these crimes, he only served 13 months in jail. He then went on to commit more crimes until his final arrest and suicide in 2019.

And Harvey Weinstein, whose “casting couch practices” of assaulting young starlets, was well known for years in Hollywood.

What they and many abusers know is that a woman’s voice has no power, like Cassandra in Greek mythology, uttering the truth but never to be believed.

Part of the problem is that girls are socialized to be friendly, smiling, respectful, and raised to be pretty — the object of desire and to conform to societal norms of the feminine and to defer to men.

I can already see the comments that I am an “angry” Black woman, but I am not angry; I am sad. I am sad that in 2024, “angry” is the only adjective that many can use after they hear what Black women have endured: no respect or admiration for the fact that we are still standing and striving.

Tarana Burke saw that as a survivor of childhood sexual assault, as she worked with the 21st Century Youth Leadership Movement and met many minority girls who, like herself, were survivors of the violent male gaze.

She founded her organization, “Just Be,” to provide workshops on well-being and healing. To let them know they were not alone, she began “#MeToo” as a safe place for survivors to gather and share their stories through empathy.

#MeToo went viral to let the world know about the epidemic of sexual violence that was happening in plain sight.

Now, it is time for another awakening about the epidemic of racism in medicine.

My troll used MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech in which Dr. King hoped for a society in which we all saw each other as equals based only on the quality of their character and not the color of their skin. What is often not known is that four years later, he gave an interview in which he said that the dream for a colorblind society was premature, with all that we still faced. His “I Have a Dream” speech is often used to close our eyes to systemic racism. I am sure this would be a nightmare for him.

So, we can spend another 30 years pretending that we have gender and racial equality, or we can stand up and do something and say something: make #EquityInMedicine go viral in words and action, and we can gather and share our stories in empathy.

This is my dream.