Review by Kevin Brown
Uché Blackstock’s memoir begins by talking about her mother, who was also a doctor and who served as the inspiration for Blackstock and her sister’s both pursuing degrees in medicine from Harvard. Her mother died in her early forties, but Blackstock continues looking back for what she can learn from how her mother lived.
The middle part of the memoir focuses on Blackstock’s medical education, where she not only encounters overt racism, but the much more subtle racism laced throughout the healthcare industry, including some beliefs about African Americans that remain from the 1800s. She eventually finds what should be her dream job at NYU only for her to continue to struggle against the racism built into such institutions.
She transitions into work that we would now call DEI, but she receives no meaningful support. In fact, she learns that people want the cover of such offices, but don’t want any meaningful change. COVID-19 impacts her work life rather dramatically, as she spends much more time working in hospitals at that point, and she quickly notices how many of the patients look more like her than she is used to seeing.
Ultimately, she leaves academic medicine, shifting her focus to health equity to try to counter the racism within healthcare systems. She questions both the legacy of racism/slavery in such systems, as well as her legacy from her mother, wondering about the choices her mother made in a system that was even more overtly racist than the one Blackstock finds herself in. She ends the book with direct suggestions to a wide variety of audiences of how they can begin the work of making healthcare more equitable, leaving the reader with a sense that there are solutions, as opposed to leaving them with feelings of despair.
Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine by Uché Blackstock. Penguin Books, 2024
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites
