Voices of Diversity

It’s February. This is typically the time where the mentors of the Tour for Diversity in Medicine (T4D) are flooding your timelines and feeds with posts about the Tour, sharing stories and pictures of the students we meet, the campuses we visited, and the lives we’ve touched. It is something that many have come to […]

Being the tour’s photographer, I was tasked with the job of “making sure you show the young black men”, early in the tours.  Thinking that it was just a balance of genders being requested, I began to see just the pattern that the doctors were speaking of during their recaps:  Black men are needed in […]

  I became a doctor by accident. At least that’s what I told myself. Growing up in a small town in Mississippi, I never dreamed about being a doctor and honestly, I don’t know anyone who wanted to or probably thought they could. At 15 and after Hurricane Katrina, I moved to another small town […]

As a black man, seeing another black man in medicine IS BELIEVING it could be you too. The most blaring problem is that there are too few black men in medicine currently, and the trend seems to be turning in the wrong direction.  Allow me to start earlier for context; I am the only doctor […]

I put my thinking cap on, and decided that I wanted to share the spectrum of emotions that we experience through our journeys. Without further adieu, I present: Being a Black Man in Medicine as told through memes.   1. Match Day.   2. When you think about all the people who are proud of […]

The year is 2017 and I am the primary physician working in the Emergency Department at my primary site in Springfield, TN.  The next available patient on the tracking board is a female patient between the age of 20-30 with abdominal pain and stable vital signs.  This chief complaint is the bread and butter of […]

Throughout my entire journey into medicine, I always seemed to take the route less traveled. One particular example would be my decision to apply to medical school. My story started off like many others, as I always wanted to be a pediatrician since I was five years old.  Just like many other stories as it […]

So my boys and I were talking on Groupme, discussing what it’s like to be a black man in medicine. We had all these different phrases that we felt spoke to our individual and collective experiences. I chimed in with, “I’m. That. Dude!!!” Almost immediately after it posted in the group, the “LIKE” icon lit […]

The field of medicine is truly an aggregate of many disciplines and filled with the many minds it takes to carry out the dictates of our Hippocratic oath.  How, though, does that specifically apply to men and, more appreciatively, black men in medicine? There have been great strides in medical innovation over the course of […]

On Monday, November 27, 2017, Twitter will (hopefully) be swarmed with Black men who are physicians proudly sharing their journeys, struggles, victories, lessons learned and advice for the next generation of black males aspiring to fulfill their dream of becoming a doctor. The reason for this is simple: there is a narrative that Black men […]