Black Man in a White Coat, Chpts. 1-5

Throughout the first five chapters of Dr. Damon Tweedy’s memoir Black Man in a White Coat Tweedy recalls the time he spent in medical school and his first few years of internship/residency. All the while, Tweedy faced discrimination by fellow students, professors, and patients. Tweedy explains, 

In a color-blind world, Duke might well have rejected me; at the very least, its admissions committee would not have offered me a full-tuition scholarship to its medical school. (14)

When Tweedy chronicled the encounter he had with his medical school professor, Dr. Gale, I immediately thought of the journal article "Race, Disadvantage and Faculty Experiences in Academic Medicine." Many health professionals, like Tweedy, experienced moments where they were mistaken for a patient, servant, or maid. Being stereotyped based on the color of your skin and assumed you are not in a position of power is undeniably humiliating. Tweedy undoubtedly feels as if he must work harder to prove himself to those around by bearing “the burden of having to represent one’s entire race” along with battling the “assumptions that the achievements of people of color are due to special favors rather than merit” (Pololi 1367).  Such instances occur when Tweedy is accused of lying about his SAT scores or assumed by patients that he was a basketball star--based solely on his appearance. Sadly, society creates--and maintains--racist and malicious stereotypes.  Some stereotypes have gone so far as to embed themselves into the minds of the group that they are about--leading to the often fictitious ideas to be taken as fact. Tweedy, while shadowing two paramedics, realizes that he himself is stereotyping fellow African-American’s,

A skinny, unkempt, wrinkled-looking man stood in a dirt patch, staring at us. My mind flooded with a sequence of negative assumptions: he was either an alcoholic or drug abuser; he had schizophrenia or some other mental illness; he had HIV, Hepatitis C, or syphilis. Was it my medical training that caused me to see him as a list of potential health problems rather than as an individual? Or was it the many ways in which I’d been indoctrinated by both white and black people, through my life, to see poor blacks as inferior and susceptible to so many problems? My reaction troubled me. What good came from thinking this way? (99)

 The constant association between African-Americans and proneness to disease leads to the false assumption that they are inferior to the rest of the, white, society. Tweedy explains that "something [he] would learn time and time again both at Duke and beyond" was that "[b]eing black can be bad for your health" (3). Not only do white patients, like Chester, discriminate against black doctors but African-American patients do as well. Unfortunately, the false notion of the inferiority of African-Americans results not only in the illusory ideas divulged by whites that they are superior and require "greater care," but also causes African-American’s to perceive black doctors as inept for the job. 

Works Cited

Tweedy, Damon. Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor's Reflections on Race and Medicine. Picador,   --------2015. 

Pololi, Linda, Lisa A. Cooper, and Phyllis Carr. "Race, Disadvantage and Faculty Experiences in -------------Academic Medicine." Journal of General Internal Medicine 25.12 (2010): 1363-1369. PMC.