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Following in her mom's footsteps, a doctor fights to make medicine more inclusive
Dr. Uché Blackstock is the author of Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons With Racism In Medicine.
Diane Zhao/Penguin Random House
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Diane Zhao/Penguin Random House
Dr. Uché Blackstock is the author of Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons With Racism In Medicine.
Diane Zhao/Penguin Random House
When Dr. Uché Blackstock was a medical student at Harvard, she had a near-death experience that gave her a sobering outlook on the state of medical care in the U.S. Suffering from excruciating stomach pain, Blackstock took herself to the E.R., where, after hours of waiting, she was told she had a stomach bug and sent home.
But in days that followed, Blackstock felt worse; it would take two more E.R. visits before she was diagnosed with appendicitis. Because it took so long for the diagnosis, her appendix ruptured, requiring emergency surgery, followed by a painful recovery that sent her back to the hospital. Later Blackstock was left to wonder: Would her treatment have been different if she weren’t Black?
“It really took a few years of processing what had happened for me to recognize that it may have been because I was a young Black woman that this diagnosis got missed,” Blackstock says.
Blackstock is the founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity. In her new book, Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons With Racism In Medicine, she explores systemic inequity in health care, tracing its origins back to the beginnings of Western medicine and to her own experiences as a medical student and doctor.
In March 2020, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Blackstock was one of the first medical professionals to raise the alarm that the virus was having a disproportionate impact on minority communities.
“For years, we’ve been talking about the Black maternal mortality crisis. But in terms of COVID’s impact on Black communities, that conversation had not started yet,” Blackstock says. “So I wrote my first op-ed on what I was worried about would happen to our communities from COVID within the first two weeks – before the end of March.”
But Blackstock is optimistic about the next generation of Black medical students, who she says are pushing for changes to the existing system.
“With the killing of Mr. George Floyd and Ms. Breonna Taylor … a lot of medical schools received demand letters from their Black students about what those students thought we should be learning,” Blackstock says. “I would say medical schools are on their way. They have a tremendous amount of work to do.”
Interview highlights
On her mother, Dr. Dale Gloria Blackstock, who died of leukemia at age 47
My mother was a brilliant woman. She was amazing. She was a trailblazer in her own right. She grew up in central Brooklyn. She had a single mom, she had five siblings, and they grew up in public assistance and so life was always very, very difficult for her. She was the first person in her family to graduate from college and then go on to Harvard Medical School, which is something that she never even probably had thought of as a little girl. But I celebrate her and I celebrate her accomplishments. But I also recognize how both racism and poverty makes the road so much harder, and that there were other brilliant, brilliant children that she grew up with that I’m sure also could have made it to Harvard Medical School and beyond, but did not because of the practices and policies that we have in place that chronically deprive our communities of the resources that they need.
On always wanting to be a doctor because of her mom
This is what happens when you have the most loving mother who is also incredibly well respected by her patients and by her colleagues. So it was sort of like, I think both Oni and I looked at her and said, you know what? We want to be just like her. We also want to be a doctor. And I think also, we were surrounded by Black women physicians: Our pediatrician, all of my mother’s friends, on our block we had other Black women physicians. So it was a reality to me. …
Dr. Dale Gloria Blackstock with her twins, Uché and Oni — both of whom followed in their mother’s footsteps by graduating from Harvard Medical School.
Courtesy of Uché Blackstock
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Courtesy of Uché Blackstock
Dr. Dale Gloria Blackstock with her twins, Uché and Oni — both of whom followed in their mother’s footsteps by graduating from Harvard Medical School.
Courtesy of Uché Blackstock
I’m getting a little emotional, but this book is also an opportunity to give her a voice to people who may not have heard of her or have met her. I always say that when people meet [my twin sister] Oni and me that they’re meeting our mother, because this woman literally poured blood, sweat and tears into us. I think because she had grown up in poverty, because she was the first to go to college and med school, she wanted a very different life for us than she had for herself. And sometimes I worry. I remember when we turned 18, she said, “I’m so tired,” and I don’t know if she may have been in the early stages of her illness then, but she said, “I am so tired. I put so much into you both.”
On how students in medical school are often taught that there is an essential biological difference between Black and white bodies — and how that teaching impacts care
That is sort of the take home-message we get. We’re taught that there are different normal values for kidney functions, that Black patients have a certain set of normal values than non-Black patients. We’re told that about lung function; that there’s a difference between Black patients and non-Black patients. And this isn’t something that is necessarily recent. A lot of these beliefs are centuries or decades old. …
So often you would read a textbook and it would say that the risk factor for diabetes or the risk factor for high blood pressure is race. Race cannot be a risk factor because it’s a social construct. What is the factor is racism or the impact of the practices and policies of systemic racism on our communities and on our health. … A lot of these studies have come out more recently to show that that so-called “race correction” factor that is used for kidney function has actually led to a delay in Black patients being referred to for specialty kidney care. Also, it’s led to delays in putting them on kidney transplant lists. So it’s compromised their care even further. They have not gotten the health care that they need for this chronic and potentially deadly disease. It almost compounds the everyday racism that they face, that there are these beliefs that are inherent within the health care system that prevent them from getting the resources that they need.
On the 1910 Flexner Report, which closed most of the historically Black medical schools in the U.S.
The Flexner Report was a report that was commissioned by the American Medical Association and the Carnegie Mellon Foundation. And essentially they commissioned an educational specialist named Abraham Flexner to go around to the 155 medical schools in the United States and in Canada, and to essentially standardize them, compare them to the standards of Western European medical schools. And so, of course, the Black medical schools, because of the legacy of slavery and the lack of wealth and resources, did not have the resources to remain open. So, essentially, Flexner recommended that five out of seven of those Black medical schools be closed and they were closed, leaving Howard and Meharry. …
In a study that came out in 2020, in the Journal of American Medical Association, it was estimated that those five schools, if they had remained open, would have trained between 25,000 and 35,000 Black physicians. When I read that, I started crying because that is such a large number of health professionals that could have cared for hundreds of thousands, probably even millions of Black patients, who could have mentored medical students, who could have done research in our communities. And so it is a tremendous loss when you think about the closure of those schools. But it also makes sense when you look at the percentages today of Black physicians. We are less than 6% of all physicians in the U.S. – and that is one of the reasons.
On how the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against affirmative action may impact Black medical students
I compare it to the Flexner Report. So you have a policy that impacts schools, led to the closure of schools, led to that tremendous number of Black physicians not being educated, essentially eras[ing] them. And I thought about the recent SCOTUS decision, it’s going to affect academic medical centers, it’s going to affect medical schools, and, I think that, long term, if it’s going to affect the diversity within medical schools, then we know that ultimately [it] will affect the number of Black physicians. And we are actually more likely to go back to our own communities to care for patients. We are more likely to work in underserved areas. … We may not see it for generations, but I think that SCOTUS’s decision is going to have a long-term impact on Black health, if medical schools and other higher-education institutions are not able to … have legal workarounds to address those changes in race conscious admissions.
On tangible ways to improve the system
Academic medical centers and medical schools … need to work on focusing on how to train students and residents to adequately and competently care for a diverse patient population. That is your priority, whether it’s in terms of developing curriculum that is focusing on anti-racism, or making sure your faculty understand how to teach in a way that really respects the honor and dignity of all the students that they’re teaching and the patients that they’re going to serve, or even to policymakers, making them understand that health is in all policies. … So I tasked different groups, even white health professionals. I said, this is not just our problem. This is not just the problem of your Black colleagues. This is not just the problem of your Black patients. They are dying prematurely. It is up to you also to speak up. It’s also up to you, to us to work on behalf of our communities. I think ultimately every health professional would say I want the best for my patients, right? But that is not happening.
Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Carmel Wroth adapted it for the web.
Jane Austen ready to party for her 250th birthday at the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Annual General Meeting in Baltimore.
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In her six completed novels, Jane Austen excelled at love stories: Elinor and Edward, Lizzie and Darcy, Fanny and Edmund, Emma and Knightley, Anne and Wentworth, heck even Catherine and Tilney. As her fans celebrate the 250th anniversary of her birth, they’d like you to know it’s a mistake to simply dismiss her work as light, frothy romances. It’s full of intricate plots, class satire and biting wit, along with all the timeless drama of human foibles, frailties and resolve.
Tessa Harings (left) learns English country dance at the Jane Austen Society of North America’s 2025 Annual General Meeting
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“The basic reason why Austen is still popular today is because all of her characters are people we know in the world,” says Tessa Harings. She’s a high school teacher from Phoenix and one of the more than 900 attendees at the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Annual General Meeting, held in Baltimore this year. “We all know of someone who’s shy and aloof and needs to be brought into the crowd. We all know someone who’s quite witty, naturally. We all know someone who is a bit silly and always looking for attention.”
Colin Firth, properly memed from the 1995 BBC miniseries. His Darcy is a big favorite with the JASNA crowd.
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Shy and aloof? That could be Darcy. Naturally witty? Lizzie Bennet. Silly and looking for attention? Take your pick: baby sister Lydia or maybe the haughty Caroline Bingley or the unctuous Mr. Collins, all creations from what might be Austen’s most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice.
Her characters have permeated modern pop culture, even among people who’ve never opened her books. Harings says that’s one reason her students want to read these Regency-era novels. They want to understand the jokes in all those short videos and memes, like Mr. Collins making awkward dinner conversation.
He wants a wife, he compliments the potatoes. In Mr. Collin’s head, it makes sense.
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Her students enjoy the tension between Darcy and Lizzie: he’s very rich, so besotted by her against his will that he can hardly dance, glower and talk at the same time. Lizzie initially cannot stand him and refuses his first proposal, as shown in this soggy scene from the 2005 movie adaptation.
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Harings says Lizzie is her favorite Austen character. “She has such sharp, sarcastic wit and she’s so self-confident, despite the fact that she’s constantly being put down by the people around her for her supposedly lower position in life as the slightly less pretty of the mother’s two oldest daughters.”
Milliner Dannielle Perry (right) and her assistant Mia Berg of Timely Tresses in their Regency-era togs.
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“When I was a teenager, I loved Lizzie and I wanted to be Lizzie,” says milliner Dannielle Perry of Oxford, N.C. She’s read and reread all of Jane Austen’s books and she loves how they change for her as she’s gotten older. She’s now more sympathetic toward Mrs. Bennet, Lizzie’s mom: a woman desperate to get her five daughters married, least they be penniless since they can’t inherit their father’s estate. “I feel sorry for her in a way I never did before,” Perry says. “She is sort of silly, but she’s lived with a man for 20 years who largely dismisses her and thinks she’s frivolous.”
Doctoral student Katie Yu, of Dallas, has this analysis of Mrs. Bennett and her husband, who seems mentally checked-out at best: “He’s not a great father. He’s always putting his wife down in front of his daughters, he’s putting his daughters down in front of his daughters.” Yu says Mr. Bennet married Mrs. Bennet because she was pretty, treats her as an inferior, and often ignores her. This is why Mrs. Bennet goes on about her nerves and “has the vapors” whenever she’s stressed: she’s trying to get his attention.
“But,” says Tessa Harings, “she still has a level of street smarts that she has to get her daughters married. And yes, she’s sincerely concerned about their future … she actually, of the two of them, is the more concerned and involved parent.”
Tom Tumbusch explains 19th century dance moves to JASNA members.
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Dance instructor Tom Tumbusch, of Cincinnati, says men can learn a lot from Austen. “Modern men struggle to find good role models,” he says. “Reading Austen’s works can help them see the places where men can go wrong.” Mr. Bennet, for example. Or the libertine George Wickham who lies and runs off with the flighty Bennet sister, Lydia. Or maybe Willoughby from Sense and Sensibility, who leads Marianne Dashwood on, ghosts her and is later revealed to have abandoned an unmarried woman who gave birth to his child.
Oh, Marianne, he’s so not worth it!
On the other hand, Tumbusch says Jane Austen’s heroes can show men “how to be masculine in a constructive way,” like owning mistakes, taking responsibility and treating women with respect. It’s not just Darcy, who works behind the scenes getting Wickham to marry Lydia, it’s also Captain Wentworth from Persuasion. Tombusch says Wentworth does what men of his station should: he uses his own resources to help someone less fortunate, the poor, partially disabled widow Mrs. Smith. And in Sense and Sensibility, there’s the steadfast Col. Brandon. Hoping to make Willoughby’s rejection of Marianne less devastating to her, he exposes the libertine’s behavior. He rides hours to retrieve her mother when Marianne is near death. He patiently, oh-so-patiently, waits for her young, broken heart to mend.
All this while wearing a flannel waistcoat because he’s on the “wrong side of five and thirty” and needs to keep those ancient bones warm.
Before he rocked worlds as Snape, Alan Rickman made the earth move for viewers of the 1995 movie adaptation of Sense and Sensibility.
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JASNA president Mary Mintz, of McLean, Va., says though Jane Austen is largely known for her marriage plots, it’s really the human need for connection that grounds her stories. “She writes about the relationships between parents and children, between siblings or among siblings, she writes about relationships with friends. And she is really insightful. When you combine that with her knowledge of human psychology, it’s a great formula for success.”
Mintz is fascinated by Emma’s pivotal character, Miss Bates. She’s a spinster and member of the gentry class who lives with her elderly mother on an extremely limited income. She’s also a nervous chatterbox, “someone who can’t stop talking,” says Mintz. “I’ve known a lot of Misses Bates in my lifetime… people who seem insecure and feel as though they have to fill up silence, but are really good-hearted people.”
When Emma is rude to Miss Bates, she’s firmly chastised by her neighbor, Mr. Knightley. It becomes a turn-around moment in the story. Humbled, Emma apologizes. She also sees how she’s been wrong to meddle in the love life of Harriet Smith, a pretty teenager whose parents are unknown.
Mintz says there’s an interesting link between Bates and Harriet, if you put two and two together.
“In Jane Austen’s actual life, mothers and daughters often share the same name,” she explains. That pattern can be seen in many of her novels. “We don’t know who Harriet Smith’s natural mother is, but at one point Miss Bates is referred to as ‘Hetty,’ which could be a diminutive for ‘Harriet.’ “
That’s the first clue. The second clue occurs during that scene where Knightley sets Emma right. He says of Miss Bates, “she has sunk from the comforts she was born to.” He then draws a contrast between the spinster’s current station and her former one: “You, whom she had known from an infant, whom she had seen grow up from a period when her notice was an honour…”
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Emma’s father is quite wealthy, so why would Miss Bates’ notice have once been so esteemed? Mary Mintz asks, “Is because she had a child out of wedlock?”
And could that child be… Harriet Smith?
The mind: it boggles! A Jane Austen Easter egg! It’s just one example of how multi-dimensional her novels are and why so many people will continue loving, analyzing and discussing her work well into the next 250 years.
Jacob Fenston and Danny Hensel edited and produced this report.
Rob Reiner And Wife Michele
Throats Slit By Family Member
Published
|
Updated
Rob Reiner and his wife Michele had their throats slit by a family member, possibly after an argument inside their Los Angeles home, leading to their tragic deaths … TMZ has learned
It’s unclear what exactly triggered the violence, which went down Sunday afternoon in Brentwood … but we’re told one of Rob’s daughters found her parents dead and told police a family member had killed them. PEOPLE reports the couple’s son, Nick, is being questioned in connection with the murders.
Our sources also say the daughter told police the family member “should be a suspect” because they’re “dangerous.”
TMZ broke the story … Rob and Michele suffered lacerations consistent with knife wounds and LAPD’s Robbery Homicide Division is investigating the case.
broadcastify.com
Dispatch audio captures a firefighter calling for backup to the Brentwood mansion around 3:30 PM … though it doesn’t provide any further information about the circumstances in the abode.
Rob was 78. Michele was 68.
Sunday Puzzle
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On-air challenge
I’m going to read you some sentences. Each sentence conceals the name of a major U.S. city in consecutive letters. As a hint, the answer’s state also appears in the sentence. Every answer has at least six letters. (Ex. The Kentucky bodybuilders will be flexing tonight. –> LEXINGTON)
1. Space enthusiasts in Oregon support landing on Mars.
2. Contact your insurance branch or agent in Alaska.
3. The Ohio company has a sale from today to next Sunday.
4. The Colorado trial ended in a sudden verdict.
5. Fans voted the Virginia tennis matches a peak experience.
6. I bought a shamrock for decorating my house in Illinois.
7. All the Connecticut things they knew have now changed.
8. Can you help a software developer in Texas?
Last week’s challenge
Last week’s challenge came from Mike Reiss, who’s a showrunner, writer, and producer for “The Simpsons.” Think of a famous living singer. The last two letters of his first name and the first two letters of his last name spell a bird. Change the first letter of the singer’s first name. Then the first three letters of that first name and the last five letters of his last name together spell another bird. What singer is this?
Challenge answer
Placido Domingo
Winner
Brock Hammill of Corvallis, Montana.
This week’s challenge
This week’s challenge comes from Robert Flood, of Allen, Texas. Name a famous female singer of the past (five letters in the first name, seven letters in the last name). Remove the last letter of her first name and you can rearrange all the remaining letters to name the capital of a country (six letters) and a food product that its nation is famous for (five letters).
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it below by Thursday, December 18 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle.
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