When one person was killed and dozens were wounded in a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., over the weekend, second-year psychiatry resident Jennifer Adaeze Okwerekwu, MD, was not surprised. Writing in a column for STAT, she said, "I've seen this anger before."
While in medical school at Charlottesville-based University of Virginia medical school, Dr. Okwerekwu, a black physician, said she observed racist behavior in regular, small transgressions with patients — and she still does. "Bigotry in a hospital gown — it's a risk I face every day when I go into work," Dr. Okwerekwu wrote.
Unlike her experience in Charlottesville, her current medical team offers support and intervenes if a patient makes disrespectful comments, she wrote. "This is the America I want. The medicine I aspire to," she wrote.
Read her full column here.
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