Earlier this fall, Harvard University successfully defended itself against the latest and most closely watched attack on university affirmative action. The lawsuit brought by conservative political strategist Edward Blum and his group Students for Fair Admissions claimed that admissions processes unfairly penalized Asian applicants in favor of black and Latino students.
Blum is known for organizing lawsuits against affirmative action policies, including another failed suit to end affirmative action at the University of Texas in 2016.
A byproduct of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, affirmative action policies were originally designed and intended to redress centuries of legal discrimination against black people in this country. However, what lies behind recent anti-affirmative action lawsuits like Blums is the notion that less qualified black applicants are unfairly taking the seats of more deserving Asian American applicants.
One of the early beneficiaries of these affirmative action policies was a black woman, one of six siblings born to a single mother and raised in poverty and who died when only 47 years old from acute myelogenous leukemia.
As a child, she had developed a love of science and became the first person in her family to graduate from college. During college, she was encouraged by a chemistry professor to apply to medical school. In the fall of 1972, she matriculated at Harvard Medical School.
At times, this young woman struggled with coursework and doubted her own abilities. Some of her classmates parents were Harvard professors, and her own mother had never even completed high school.
But she was determined, and graduated from medical school in 1976. Her residency at Harlem Hospital followed, then a fellowship in Brooklyn, after which she remained to practice medicine in the same Brooklyn neighborhood where she grew up. As she rendered diligent care and attention to her neighbors, other black medical students and junior faculty sought her out for inspiration and advice. She became a mentor to a generation of Brooklyn medical aspirants and a guiding force for local black physicians organizations.
That woman was my mother, Dr. Dale Gloria Blackstock.
My twin sister, Oni, and I would accompany her to the hospital, meetings and conferences. Growing up, we had assumed most physicians were black because of her and our medical environment, but that assumption was, of course, wrong. The number of black physicians remains stubbornly low. Currently, only 4% of all U.S. physicians are black, although black people account for 13% of the population.
Our mothers passion for learning, her dogged perseverance and her commitment to serving her community heavily influenced our own decision to become physicians. We are the first black mother-daughter legacy from Harvard Medical School and, although we practice medicine in a different era, our struggles are similar.
Structural racism still inflicts heavy blows on the health status and outcomes of black people in this country. Racial health disparities, compounded by the dearth of black physicians, have stubbornly persisted over the last decades, and we are currently in the midst of a black maternal mortality crisis.
Black physicians and other health care professionals are one of the critical solutions to addressing these profound health disparities. We are more likely to specialize in primary care and practice in underserved communities. Additionally, racial concordance in clinician-patient interactions has been shown to improve health outcomes, particularly among black patients. Yet the erroneous assumption that African Americans are somehow edging out better qualified applicants remains a stubborn and damning myth.
The fact is that among the documents submitted as part of the affirmative action lawsuit was the internal study Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard, which revealed how, from 2009 until 2014, 43% of all white applicants Harvard accepted were either legacies, athletes or the children of donors and faculty. Without these white affirmative action advantages, only 1 in 4 of those students would have been accepted to the school.
Our mother had the talent and drive to become a physician. Affirmative action policies helped to mitigate the structural impediments blocking her path to success, and that of many others like her. Although she died prematurely, her legacy lives on in the patients she cared for, the communities she served, the future physicians she mentored and the organizations she led.
Last month, a group of black alumni from Harvard Medical School gathered to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the schools 1969 diversity initiative, started in response to Martin Luther King Jr.s assassination. My twin sister and I attended to represent our class of 2005 and also to represent our mother, class of 1976.
Uche Blackstock, M.D., is a physician and founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity. She wrote this column for the Chicago Tribune.
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Uche Blackstock: Mother, daughters, doctors. Affirmative action at Harvard makes a generational ripple in improving black health care - St. Paul...