Patients need doctors who look like them. Can medicine diversify without affirmative action?

Kat Stafford

apnews.com

Originally posted 11 September 23

Here are two excerpts:

But more than two months after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions, concerns have arisen that a path into medicine may become much harder for students of color. Heightening the alarm: the medical field’s reckoning with longstanding health inequities.

Black Americans represent 13% of the U.S. population, yet just 6% of U.S. physicians are Black. Increasing representation among doctors is one solution experts believe could help disrupt health inequities.

The disparities stretch from birth to death, often beginning before Black babies take their first breath, a recent Associated Press series showed. Over and over, patients said their concerns were brushed aside or ignored, in part because of unchecked bias and racism within the medical system and a lack of representative care.

A UCLA study found the percentage of Black doctors had increased just 4% from 1900 to 2018.

But the affirmative action ruling dealt a “serious blow” to the medical field’s goals of improving that figure, the American Medical Association said, by prohibiting medical schools from considering race among many factors in admissions. The ruling, the AMA said, “will reverse gains made in the battle against health inequities.”

The consequences could affect Black health for generations to come, said Dr. Uché Blackstock, a New York emergency room physician and author of “LEGACY: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine.”

(cut)

“As medical professionals, any time we see disparities in care or outcomes of any kind, we have to look at the systems in which we are delivering care and we have to look at ways that we are falling short,” Wysong said.

Without affirmative action as a tool, career programs focused on engaging people of color could grow in importance.

For instance, the Pathways initiative engages students from Black, Latino and Indigenous communities from high school through medical school.

The program starts with building interest in dermatology as a career and continues to scholarships, workshops and mentorship programs. The goal: Increase the number of underrepresented dermatology residents from about 100 in 2022 to 250 by 2027, and grow the share of dermatology faculty who are members of color by 2%.

Tolliver credits her success in becoming a dermatologist in part to a scholarship she received through Ohio State University’s Young Scholars Program, which helps talented, first-generation Ohio students with financial need. The scholarship helped pave the way for medical school, but her involvement in the Pathways residency program also was central.

The info is here.

Belief in a Just World and Attitudes Toward Affirmative Action

By Vicky M. Wilkins and Jeffrey B. Wenger
Policy Studies Journal
Volume 42, Issue 3, pages 325–343, August 2014

The effect of identity, as socially constructed by race and gender, on social policies has been widely examined in policy analysis. Policy analysis would be improved by a wider discussion that includes the influence of social-psychological constructs on social provision. We fill this gap by drawing on the theory of the “belief in a just world” and link this theory to attitudes toward the support of controversial government programs. We argue that this theory is a critical antecedent to the previous research on social construction. We hypothesize that citizens who perceive that the world is just and that opportunities are equal between groups are much less likely to favor government interventions altering market outcomes. We find that after controlling for race, sex, and political ideology, respondents who believe that luck is the primary determinant of success (low belief in a just world) are more supportive of preferential hiring programs for African Americans and women.

The article is here.

"I Wish I Were Black" and Other Tales of Privilege

By Angela Onwuachi-Willig
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally published October 28, 2013

To be white is to not think about it," a white legal scholar named Barbara Flagg wrote two decades ago.

After the University of Texas at Austin denied Abigail Fisher admission, she made several statements that revealed just how little she had ever had to think about her race. Fisher, the petitioner in the Supreme Court's recently decided affirmative-action case, said in a videotaped interview made available by her lawyers: "There were people in my class with lower grades who weren't in all the activities I was in, who were being accepted into UT, and the only other difference between us was the color of our skin."

As decades of debates over affirmative action have revealed, many whites spend so little time having to think about, much less deal with, race and racism, that they understand race as nothing more than a plus factor in the admissions process. Like Fisher, they fail to see the many disadvantages that stem from simply existing as a person of color in this country—disadvantages that often hamper opportunities to achieve the badges that help students "win" in the admissions game.

The entire article is here.