Legacy
About This Book
Uché Blackstock grew up in Brooklyn with her twin sister, Oni, and neither of them ever imagined being anything but a doctor. In the 1980s their mother led an organization of Black women physicians, and the girls spent years watching those women treat patients and neighbors, run community health fairs, and save lives. The sisters followed their mother to Harvard Medical School, where they became the school's first Black mother-daughter legacies. What Blackstock did not grasp as a child, and did not learn at Harvard, was how deep and old the inequities in American medicine run. Today only 2 percent of U.S. physicians are Black women, and racist practices and policies leave Black Americans with worse health outcomes than any other group in the country. The same flawed system puts communities like hers at risk. As an ER physician and later a professor in academic medicine, she saw the barriers facing Black patients and Black doctors up close. Legacy follows her path from child to medical student to practicing physician, and then to her work as a health equity advocate during the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. The book combines a generational family memoir, a critique of the healthcare system, and a call to action on the place where racism and medicine meet.
ISBN: 9780593491287
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