Out of that, we’re working on a second book, Diversity and Inclusion in Quality Patient Care. We wrote and edited a book, Sheryl Heron, Lisa Moreno-Walton, and I, and Leon contributed. We’re working on another book, Case Continuum, we’re calling it. It’s about 70 cases. We’re asking people who have personally experienced microaggressions or implicit biases to write about when a patient may say, “I don’t want a Mexican doctor,” “I don’t want a female doctor,” “I don’t want a gay doctor,” “I don’t want a Muslim doctor,” “I don’t want a foreign doctor,” and it goes on and on and on. That book should be finished in March.

I could give you tons of examples. I was in several roles at Allegheny General in Pittsburgh as a residency program director, then I became the acting chair of the department my last year there. However, we were a division of surgery and the chair of surgery favored a younger person who was a white male who happened to be one of my residents I had trained. I had been there much longer than he. The person who was the chair left, and it was a natural progression for me after all of the work I had done, but I had to fight for that. Fortunately, the majority of the faculty stood up and wrote letters of support, and I became the chairman. Coming to UVA, the first African-American chair, newly minted department, there were some people who didn’t quite welcome me. So, yeah, the aggressions have been, in form of microaggressions, subtle, but there have been outright biases as well.

KK: Lynne, how about you?

LR: I always had the benefit, at least in terms of the people to whom I directly reported, of dealing with people who treated me fairly and valued the contributions that I could make. However, that was not always the case. I had so many experiences early on in high school and in college in dealing with more overt kinds of racism and bias. By the time I began my career as an emergency physician, I had a pretty well-developed tool set for dealing with that. I was fortunate; there were lots of people who helped me along the way, sometimes in very casual ways, but I really never had the kind of mentorship that I now try to give to the young faculty, fellows, and residents that I mentor. I think I understand very clearly the importance of mentorship because I largely built my career without it, and I think that made lots of things very difficult. I had to perhaps wait longer, fight harder for opportunities that mentors might have helped me get access to. I tried to do good work and kept trying to learn as much as I could. I was always very driven by making a difference as opposed to getting ahead, but I managed somehow to get ahead while I was making a difference.