Experiencing Racism in Health Care: Stories from Health Care Professionals

This symposium includes twelve personal narratives from individuals who have experienced racism in the workplace or during training. Racial minority health care professionals face discrimination in their clinical roles by patients, colleagues, supervisors, and instructors. Some of this behavior is overt and reveals conscious racial discrimination and structural historic racist policies. Other times, it is more subtle, supported by the unconscious bias of individuals, individual or systemic microaggressions or by institutional policies that may have been written to address more egregious acts. The problem of racism in health care has far-reaching implications for health care professionals, their patients, and society. Racism, bias, microaggressions, tokenism, and other forms of oppressive behaviors cut like a razor to the fabric that holds societies together. When unchallenged in healthcare, these acts fuel infant and maternal mortality, decrease life expectancy in communities of color, and result in a myriad of health disparities while limiting the pool of qualified minority (or other) providers allowed to serve.