Freedom is never really won. You earn it and win it in every generation. – Coretta Scott King
I am an African-American pediatrician, public health professional, and a university professor of medical and nursing students and of pre-health professions undergraduate students.
In my heart, however, I am a time traveler.
I am connected to centuries of civil rights milestones that changed reality for African-American children like me. Now, as a medical educator, I use “my day job” to reach deep beneath the surface of society to the same streams that have systematically deflected and diminished the value of Americans of African descent since this nation’s founding.
Despite how calm the surface of U.S. society may look from time to deceptive time, there is a constant and undeniable undertow of racial inequality and ascribed differential value. This undertow continues to pull us, phantom-like, downstream – even against our best, conscious efforts to do better – toward another generation of racially unequal health and health care quality, and social inequality, more broadly.
And yet, we health professions educators are curiously ahistorical in how we teach students, trainees and future researchers effective strategies to achieve the elimination of racial disparities in health. When I hear terms like social determinants of health, community engagement, community-based participatory research, implicit bias, and health equity, I wonder why we neglect using the American past to teach today’s students.
Could it be that our curricula reflect an unspoken belief: all we need is more students mechanistically skilled in well-executed, one-on-one, cross-cultural clinical encounters, multivariate analyses, legislative advocacy, or assets-based community development?
