Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine
Uche BlackstockLegacy is an illuminating & stirring journey of a book.” — Ibram X. Kendi, #1 New York Times- bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist
The rousing, captivating story of a Black physician, her career in medicine, & the deep inequities that still exist in the U.S. healthcare system
Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, it never occurred to Uché Blackstock & her twin sister, Oni, that they would be anything but physicians. In the 1980s, their mother headed an organization of Black women physicians, & for years the girls watched these fiercely intelligent women in white coats tend to their patients & neighbors, host community health fairs, cure ills, & save lives.
What Dr. Uché Blackstock did not understand as a child—or learn about at Harvard Medical School, where she & her sister had followed in their mother’s footsteps, making them the first Black mother-daughter legacies from the school—were the profound & long-standing systemic inequities that mean just 2 percent of all U.S. physicians today are Black women; the racist practices & policies that ensure Black Americans have far worse health outcomes than any other group in the country; & the flawed system that endangers the well-being of communities like theirs. As an ER physician, & later as a professor in academic medicine, Dr. Blackstock became profoundly aware of the systemic barriers that Black patients & physicians continue to face.
Legacy is a journey through the critical intersection of racism & healthcare. At once a searing indictment of our healthcare system, a generational family memoir, & a call to action, Legacy is Dr. Blackstock’s odyssey from child to medical student to practicing physician—to finally seizing her own power as a health equity advocate against the backdrop of the pandemic & the Black Lives Matter movement.