Thread by @DocMCohen

How is it possible that a surgeon can hang a NOOSE to target a Black colleague and escape penalty?

I'll tell you how: medicine has a deeply bigoted history and an inability to deal with the misconduct of powerful men.

THREAD
cbc.ca/news/canada/ed…

Medicine grew out of an explicitly white supremacist culture, one that quite literally believed racialized people were biologically inferior and treated them as subhuman.

That history is NOT in the distant past. BIPOC people continue to face discrimination in health care daily.

Entry of women and racialized groups into medicine was restricted through much of the 20th C. And while equity & inclusion are popular new mottos in the profession, we still see severe underrepresentation of Black and Indigenous people and a lack of women in medical leadership.

Modern medical institutions are awash with equity, diversity and inclusion rhetoric.

This is from the @AHS_media, the provincial health authority that was given a PHOTO OF THE NOOSE and chose to overlook it and allow the perpetrator to retain his multiple leadership roles.

This is from @uoftmedicine, it was hung on the building's façade in 2018 as part of major campaign on equity & inclusion.

In the same year the "We All Belong" campaign launched, the university dismissed extensive evidence of long-standing gender discrimination by a faculty member.

Only after media exposure and a @CdnWIM petition did they finally acknowledge a problem. theglobeandmail.com/canada/article…

Intertwined in this history of bigotry is a culture built upon a strict hierarchy that considers humiliation a form of teaching and personal/physical sacrifice essential to the practice of medicine.

We celebrate those who have given up everything to climb the ladder of power.

This creates a professional culture ill-equipped to deal with abuse of power and unable to address its own long-standing problems with bigotry & discrimination.

Papering over this history with empty declarations of equity will NOT resolve these issues.

Until medicine can meaningfully address its own history and acknowledge how that history informs the profession's culture today, we will not see an end to bigoted harassment.

Instead we will see medicine continue to fail again and again at holding powerful men to account.

FIN