(Excerpted from the National Working Group’s article for the Journal of Urban Health, “White Coats for Black Lives: Medical Students Responding to Racism and Police Brutality.” You can read the full article here.)
Last fall [fall 2014], Black people and their allies took to social media and the streets to assert that, despite the non-indictment of officers responsible for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, Black lives matter. While these protests sparked national dialogue about racism and violence against communities of color, our medical school campuses remained silent and detached. As medical trainees invested in the lives and well-being of people of color, we felt called to action by the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Medicine is not immune to the racism that pervades our education, housing, employment, and criminal justice systems. Moreover, racism and police brutality damage the health and lives of people of color, particularly Black people, and must be addressed as a public health crisis.
Initially, students at different medical schools initiated conversations and planned separate actions to engage with larger, national struggles for racial justice. For example, students at the University of California San Francisco, School of Medicine and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai independently planned die-in demonstrations regionally and locally, respectively, in solidarity with national die-ins in public spaces. Students at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, who at the time were writing an open letter calling for a public response to racism from medical professionals, heard about the actions being planned at UCSF and Mount Sinai and created a line of communication among the three schools. Students at these schools coordinated a single, national die-in demonstration on December 10, International Human Rights Day.
Through social media, interpersonal connections, and a press release sent out by Physicians for a National Health Program, who endorsed the action, news of the die-in quickly spread nationwide. Ultimately, over 3000 students at more than 80 medical schools across the country participated in the action, demonstrating solidarity with communities protesting against racism and police brutality and publicly stating that health professionals must confront police violence and institutionalized racism. This message was not confined to individual campuses. Under the hashtag #whitecoats4blacklives, these actions trended on social media and were covered by traditional media, including print, radio, and TV, amplifying our message of solidarity and the call for racial justice in medicine.
Having created a national network of justice-minded medical students, we wanted to build on our classmates’ energy around the protests and ensure that #whitecoats4blacklives was not simply a one-time action but an ongoing movement. Moreover, we wanted to continue to emphasize that the influence granted to physicians should be directed toward social progress for all, particularly to those most affected by racism and burdened by poor health outcomes. We therefore sought to reinvigorate efforts within the medical establishment to promote health equity and support communities of color in their struggles for justice. The national medical student organization, White Coats for Black Lives (WC4BL), was therefore created on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 2015, to further these goals.