A viral video of a woman at a Canadian clinic demanding to see a white doctor has the internet buzzing about her demands. While many are shocked by the woman’s insistence that she will only allow a white doctor to treat her son, there is one group of people who are not shocked by the video, or the woman’s brazen display of racism:
Black doctors.
While the internet may be clutching their pearls, according to numerous studies and anecdotal examples, non-white doctors and nurses see this all the time. The Root spokewith 12 black medical professionals who all say they have encountered similar situations, some routinely.
One of the medical world’s open secrets is that patients routinely refuse treatment from non-white physicians and nurses. In 2013 Tonya Battle sued a Flint, Mich. hospital when a supervisor held a meeting to inform the hospital workers that parents of a child in the neonatal ICU unit didn’t want black members of the staff caring for the newborn—even posting a note that read: “No African American nurse to take care of baby.”
In 2010, a federal appeals court found a nursing home in violation of the Civil rights act after they refused to hire a black woman because they had racist patients in the nursing home. In another federal lawsuit, three black employees of a Philadelphia hospital were prevented from treating a pregnant woman because her partner was a white supremacist.
Dr. Karen Reynolds, a physician who works at Birmingham’s only hospital for the poor and indigent, recalls a patient coming into the emergency room, only to walk out angrily shouting “I don’t want no nigger touching me!”
“About once a month we have a patent leave when they find out the doctor is black,” said Samirah Hatcher, a registered nurse at a North Carolina urgent care clinic. “I don’t know why it even matters, and we still have to charge them for the visit!”
Of the dozen black medical professionals we spoke to—8 doctors and 4 registered nurses—only one couldn’t recall an incident where a patient refusing treatment because of his race.
“It has never happened to me,” said Suliemann Wazeerud-din, a black emergency physician in Atlanta. “The community I work in is diverse. I’m sure it happens like that in the suburbs.”
A 2002 study by John Hopkins University found that—when given the choice—most patients prefer a doctor of their own race. I too have fallen victim to this antiquated thinking, but for entirely different reasons.
Not just because a 2016 study revealed that white physicians believed some disturbing things, like black skin is thicker, and black people are less sensitive to pain. My preference doesn’t stem from the fact that studies show that mediocre white students often get into medical school because their parents were physicians, while every black doctor I meet was the smartest kid in their elementary school, high school and college. It’s not because of the Tuskeegee experiment or Henrietta Lacks. I like prefer black doctors for one reason:
I can invite them to the cookout.
