The American Medical Association, which for generations barred its doors to physicians of color, is moving ahead with a strategic plan to “dismantle structural racism starting from within the organization, acknowledging that equity work requires recognition of past harms and critical examination of institutional rolls upholding those structures.”
The plan is “driven by the immense need for equity-centered solutions to confront harms produced by systemic racism and other forms of oppression for Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, and other people of color, as well as people who identify as LGBTQ+ and people with disabilities. The groundwork for the plan began in 2019, when the AMA Center for Health Equity was launched as a result of a resolution passed by the AMA’s House of Delegates. Its urgency is underscored by ongoing circumstances including inequities exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing police brutality, and hate crimes targeting Asian, Black, and Brown communities,” according to an AMA press release.
In an emailed statement, the AMA broke the plan into five strategic approaches:
- “Embed equity and racial justice throughout the AMA by expanding capacity for understanding and implementing anti-racist equity strategies via practices, programming, policies, and culture.
- “Build alliances with marginalized physicians and other stakeholders through developing structures and coalitions to elevate the experiences and ideas of historically marginalized and minoritized health care leaders.
- “Push upstream to address all determinants of health and root causes of inequities by strengthening, empowering, and equipping physicians with the knowledge of and tools for dismantling structural and social drivers of health inequities.
- “Ensure equitable structures and opportunities in innovation through embedding and advancing racial justice and health equity within existing AMA efforts.
- “Foster pathways for truth, racial healing, reconciliation, and transformation for AMA’s past by accounting for how policies and processes excluded, discriminated, and harmed communities, and by amplifying and integrating the narratives of historically marginalized physicians and patients.”
As outlined, the plan marks the latest phase of what can be considered a slow awakening for the “House of Medicine,” which first addressed the issue of racism in 1868. At that time, there were just a handful of Black doctors and many states were enacting laws that institutionalized racism. Against that background, a group of Black physicians petitioned the AMA for membership.
Those petitioners were met by Nathan S. Davis, MD, whom the AMA lionizes as the “founder of the AMA” and memorializes annually with the Nathan Davis Award for outstanding contributions that “promote the art and science of medicine and the betterment of public health,” who said the question of admitting “Negro” doctors should be left to state and local chapters. That “Davis” rule allowed the AMA to continue to bar Black doctors, until the civil rights legislation in the 1960s forbade such discrimination.
In a June 2014 article titled “The American Medical Association and Race,” Robert B. Baker, PhD, wrote that 140 years would pass before another Davis—Ronald Davis, MD, who was elected AMA president in 2005—would journey to Atlanta to meet with leaders of the National Medical Association, a group formed by Black physicians when they were turned away by the AMA, to offer this apology: “I humbly come to the physicians of today’s National Medical Association, to tell you that we are sorry… on behalf of the American Medical Association, I unequivocally apologize for our past behavior. We pledge to do everything in our power to right the wrongs that were done by our organization to African-American physicians and their families and their patients.”
By the time of that apology—a formal version of which was also published in JAMA—Black physicians were voting members of the AMA’s policy-making body, the House of Delegates. Moreover, in 1995 Lonnie Bristow, MD, became the first Black doctor to be elected president of the American Medical Association, which was 3 years ahead of the AMA electing its first woman president—Nancy Dickey, MD. The AMA’s current president, Sue Bailey, MD, is also a woman, and her predecessor was a Black woman.
Peggy Peck, Editor-in-Chief, BreakingMED™
Cat ID: 150
Topic ID: 88,150,730,192,150,151,590,925
