Actions Speak Louder

Many of our institutions have issued statements in the past several weeks publicly supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, while failing to take action to take concrete action. White Coats for Black Lives is taking this opportunity to revitalize our prior Actions Speak Louder campaign, which seeks to hold our medical schools and hospitals accountable to their stated commitments around racial justice. We invite our local chapters to participate by:

1. Drafting a list of demands (see below).
2. Collecting signatures or endorsements on those demands.
3. Delivering those demands to their medical school or hospital administration.
4. Taking additional action to apply pressure to their institution. This can include posting to social media using the hashtags #ActionsSpeakLouder and #whitecoats4blacklives. We will be having further discussions in the coming weeks about other, coordinated ways apply pressure — stay tuned!
5. Completing the 2020-2021 Racial Justice Report Card as an additional accountability mechanism (more information to come in the coming months).

In drafting your demands, we encourage you to learn more about the work and demands being formulated by local Black-led organizations. We also encourage you to craft demands reflecting White Coats for Black Lives’ commitments to anti-racism, abolition, anti-capitalism, and anti-imperialism. You may wish to use the following national demands as a starting point:

Demands for Medical Schools

1. Policing is incompatible with education. This means that medical schools must:
   1. End their relationships with local law enforcement.
   2. Publicly commit not to collaborate with ICE enforcement actions.
   3. Publicly release data on the race of students, faculty/staff, and community members involved in interactions with campus police officers, and develop a clear action plan to address racist inequities in campus police interactions.
   4. Eliminate the budget for campus policing, and reallocate those funds to programs supporting BIPOC (Black, indigenous, and people of color) students and staff and individuals in crisis.
2. Black people make up 13% of the U.S. population, but only 5% of physicians. To create a representative physician workforce, medical schools would need to admit classes made up only of Black, Latinx, and Native American students for the next 10 years. Medical schools must therefore commit to admitting incoming classes in 2021 with over-representation of Black, Latinx, and Native American students (at least 26% Black, 34% Latinx, and 2% Native American). This means that medical schools must:
   1. Publicly release a detailed plan about how they plan to create a first-year class in 2021 with overrepresenation of Black, Latinx, and Native American students.
3. Medical schools must fully support their BIPOC students. This means that they must:
   1. Publicly release data on the preclinical/clinical grades and rates of AOA election for students of different races and develop a plan to immediately address any inequities. This plan would likely include the abolition of AOA.
   2. Increase by at least 50% the funding dedicated specifically to supporting BIPOC students, including mentorship, scholarships, and dedicated support staff.
   3. As part of a  broader project of reckoning with medicine’s troubling history of racism, undertake research into the ideologies and activities of individuals featured on their campuses, and remove the names and images of those found to have supported eugenics or other white supremacist causes. This research must extend not only to historical figures, but also to contemporary donors who have engaged in practices such as weapons manufacturing, exploitation of low-wage workers, funding of racist political causes, and employment discrimination. 

Demands for Hospitals

1. Policing is incompatible with health. This means that hospitals must:  
   1. End their relationships with local law enforcement.
   2. Publicly commit not to collaborate with ICE enforcement actions.
   3. Publicly release data on the race of staff, patients, and family members involved in interactions with hospital security officers and develop a clear action plan to address racist inequities in security interactions. 
   4. Eliminate the budget for hospital security, and reallocate those funds to programs supporting BIPOC (Black, indigenous, and people of color) patients and staff, and to alternative strategies for supporting people in crisis (e.g. social work and mental health services).
2. Although racial segregation of medical care is illegal, most health systems effectively segregate patient care through triage decision-making, discrimination based on insurance status, and use of trainees to care for marginalized patients. This means hospitals must:
   1. Publicly release data on the racial demographics, primary language, and insurance status  of patients seen in each hospital practice and hospital within a health system. 
   2. Publicly release data on the demographics of patients seen by providers of different training levels within the health system (residents, NPs, PAs, fellows, attendings).
   3. Develop a clear action plan to address inequities in access to comprehensive care by fully-trained providers.
3. Over 1 million healthcare workers and their children live in poverty, and these workers are disproportionately Black women. This means that hospitals must:
   1. Publicly release data on the minimum wages paid to hospital and subcontracted staff.
   2. Develop a plan to immediately increase the minimum wage for all hospital and subcontracted staff to the local living wage.

You can also see examples of demands crafted by White Coats for Black Lives chapters and affiliated groups:

• Boston Medical Center
• Brigham and Women’s Hospital
• Harvard Medical School
• Thomas Jefferson University
• UCLA Health
• University of North Carolina
• University of Pittsburgh

If you would like to share your chapter’s demands or would like more information about how to participate in the Actions Speak Louder campaign, please feel free to contact us!