Thoughts on Ferguson From South Africa

        If I were back in New York City I would be blocking a street in support of the Ferguson protests demands. I've simply had it with a system that refuses to treat me as an equal human being. Because I am both a medical doctor and a patient, I am often made acutely aware of how little people think of me because of my race. The day I flew out of the US, I had some prescriptions to fill. My normal pharmacy had run out of one drug, so my pharmacist called in the drug to another pharmacy. The other pharmacy, a Rite Aid, decided that since they would replace my drug with another one, however the dosages were not equivalent. I pointed this out to the Rite Aid pharmacist, a redheaded young white woman. For some minutes I stood there arguing as she spoke to me as if I were an illiterate five year old. At some point, I interrupted her, and told her "Look, I think you should know I'm a physician and I prescribe these drugs myself, I'm going to show you my package, and have you read the dosage out loud, then take your drug and read the dosage  out loud. You will see the number of milligrams in one is about 60% of the number of milligrams in the other..." At that point the pharmacist rolled her eyes and examined the boxes. Then she started to panic. She realized I was correct. She probably also realized it isn't a good idea to assume every black person is borderline illliterate, and speak to them as such.
   
     This tiny incident brought back innumerable memories where other medical professionals have assumed I was a stupid, and definitely not a doctor even if I was wearing a white coat and an ID. It also brought back memories of how certain doctors had treated me as a patient: essentially as some sort of inferior person who didn't deserve decent medical care. Not every doctor has treated me this way, but enough so that I now think dealing with most American doctors is hopeless; a pretty sad statement considering that I am one of them.

     Here in South Africa, I am not considered black. I'm considered an American. People can't understand why I think I am black. But being black in America is fundamentally a political situation. Our political situation goes right back to the founding of the country in which we were counted as 3/5ths of person. In fact it goes back further to when the UK was moving towards abolition and wealthy whites in the colonies panicked, founding a country at least in part to avoid setting my ancestors free from slavery. Hundreds of years later we are now stuck in some kind of miserable existential political crisis. We have only succeeded in putting black faces on a system that is white supremacist. Yet, we are constantly reminded we will not be considered a deserving equal human rights. Whether it is drone bombing hundreds of brown people at wedding parties or drone bombing US American children in the middle East without any trial or shutting of people's water in Detroit; most of us get the message. Brown lives somehow just don't matter as much as white ones. Some of us will be killed by acts of police or military aggression, but it is important to understand that others of us will be killed by acts of total indifference. I remember the shock and horror of a German anesthesiologist I know about some time she spent as a medical student in the US. She told me of patients who had cancer, but lacked money, who were simply diagnosed and discharged...for many reasons, those kinds of patients, sent off to quietly die for lack of funds are disproportionally us. What shocked my German colleague the most was that the other doctors didn't seem to care. Even after a lifetime of being black I am hit with the same sense of shock as I watch most American's indifference to the Detroit water shut-offs. My best friend, who is white, reminds me a lot of people just don't like black people; people are still racist.
     
      Racial hatred goes in all directions except away but the damage of racism is not equally distributed. Just yesterday at the hostel I am staying at I met a thirtyish Italian backpacker who told me he "hated Jews". I continued to talk to him, and told him I was Jewish. Moments like this are inconvenient and embarrassing, but I do not have the same political situation on my hands over being a semi-semite that I do over being black. I don't think I'll see the day where some other doctor has me as a patient and treats me like a moron because I'm Jewish. Jews are well represented in American medicine. Blacks make up under 5% of American doctors, with a significant percentage of those being non-African-American blacks (Africans, Afro-Caribbeans etc.). The bizarre underprevalance of African-Americans in medicine particular is not strange seen from the perspective that being a black American is a political situation. I've read that years ago when African dignitaries would come to the area near the US capital they were given pins to distinguish them from other blacks, and therefore allow them to dine with whites. Apparently the discrimination wasn't about color. It wasn't about culture either given the melting pot mentality that absorbed and assimilated all kinds of people every generation. It was about keeping a particular group of people in a certain situation.

    I am not delusional enough to think white people will wake up tomorrow and understand the political situation of blacks. Nor am I crazy enough to think all white people are evil or out to get me. My own guidechildren are white, and I'm actually quite happy about it. I've noticed that usually when I meet a white person who "gets it", they had a positive black role model early in life. I think these kinds of white people people hit some sort of cognitive dissonance between the popular understanding (or more precisely imagination) of blacks, and those really nice psychologists or physicians or whoever down the street who happened to be black. At some point they realized the official story of blacks as a problem is oh so much bullshit. The problem, unfortunately, is the entire situation.

    My guidekids were adopted. It takes a whole lot of problems for the social service system to take white kids away from their parents. Working through some of these issues with my guidekids has taught me that yes, white American people suffer too. There is a white underclass in the US and it's problems are as real as those of black folks. Social class remains the elephant in the room almost no one is talking about in the US. We can talk about blacks, and we can talk about inequality, either of which become an imperfect proxy for the lower class at times.

    I do believe that one day, probably after I am dead, Americans will reach reconciliation. I think of how young voters black and white elected Obama; and I vaguely remember his campaign message. Hope.