Today, I received a text from my unusually good looking and ethnically-vague friend, Nicole (she lives near San Francisco, and ironically enough, went back to school to complete her bachelors at the same little hokey college where I completed my postbacc). For the record, Nicole (like me), is half Hispanic, although her variation sounds much more interesting because even saying you're Chilean just sounds so much hotter than saying you're Mexican. Le sigh.
Nicole: "I got my eyebrows waxed yesterday and I'm literally convinced they hold the key to ethnic diversity. Unwaxed eyebrows make people wonder...is she Latina? Mixed? White? Ungroomed? (kidding). Then the second I get them waxed it's like BOOM, you're definitely Armenian or Persian."
Veronica: [replies with .jpg of hot cheetos and a diet coke with the subtitle "lunch."]
Anyways, you get the point. While this is possibly the weirdest segue to a meaningful post, it got me thinking about a broader issue I'm actually very passionate about.
Labels.
It doesn't matter what kind; racial, relationship-oriented, cultural, religious. I wish I could say I dislike them, but to be honest, that's not true. There's a reason we say we "identify" with others...and I find it hard to argue that we are all kindred spirits on the basis that we all are vertebrates who walk upright. There are certain societal roles, values, and interests that help shape our personality; I don't need to belabour the obvious. But what Nicole says, even benignly, addresses a good point. Whether we are conscientious of it or not, we often rush to categorize people. I use that word selectively because I don't see it as synonymous with malignant stereotyping. Before this easily becomes a blog about a blog, I present to you the Throwback Thursday variety of Blogger: something I wrote for a competition not long ago. Did I win? Nah, but I got a really cool pin in the mail for my submission. #worthit. Anyways, I present to you:
Dr. Mexican
What’s in a name?
Throughout
the latter half of my life, I have embraced and opted to identify
myself as firstly, a Latina, and secondly, a white female. I say this
because it took many years to explore and accept my cultural heritage as
something beyond my phenotype. At first encounter, many assume my freckles and pale skin classify me as white, and in the past, I reacted almost indignantly. “My last name is Williams because my mother wasn’t married; I don’t know my dad…but he’s Mexican. I’m half Mexican” was a standardized response. When
peers remarked that I was awarded a grant upon entering college because
I “checked the Hispanic box,” I felt a flare of defensiveness, although
I feigned indifference. Where had this notion of minority equals
sympathy money become propagated? More
importantly, why was it perpetuated amongst intellectuals who were
supposed to represent equality in a field made competitive not by
affirmative action, but by meritocracy?
For years, I had entertained myself with a psychosocial “name game.” What if I had been given my Mexican father’s last name, Reyes-Iboa?
I imagined what it would be like to be paged as Doctor Reyes-Iboa, and
by contrast, Doctor Williams. Even my imagination would elicit starkly
different scenarios; one of a fluent Spanish dialogue, taking a patient
history in an inner city clinic in Los Angeles, and another in a
seemingly vanilla, big-city hospital, probably as a specialist.
But the irony was that I was neither of these things. At the time, I was still a closet pre-med majoring in Theater and barely passing a minor in Biological Sciences. My
inability to excel in the hard sciences made me reluctant to openly
admit my dream of medicine, knowing that once I vocalized it, I would be
held at a standard that was seemingly unattainable from both an
academic and financial outlook. My
obsession with how I would be perceived racially had me inclined to
keep mum; I didn’t want my accomplishments attributed to this phenomenon
of “Hispanic-box-checking” and I didn’t want my failures to be a
racially charged statistic of “x percent of minorities struggling in
science.” And so, as I was
trying to form a career path that suited my genuine interest in
promoting the welfare of my community, I was also trying to form an
identity. Was I too white to be Hispanic, too Hispanic to be white? Was I too middle-class to be socioeconomically disadvantaged?
It
wasn’t until I was desperately mailing off applications to premed
post-bacc programs in a last-ditch effort to remedy my grades that I met
someone who changed my life. I was at the post office, and had dropped
all of my change. His name was
Tommy Hand, an MS-II at UC Irvine School of Medicine, and he picked up
all of my coins as I fumbled to introduce myself, fearing he’d see right
through to my academic incompetence, my racial ambiguity, my cultural
wish-washy-ness. The white Mexican that wants to be a physician living out of her car with a 2.81 grade point average. I was terrified. “Post-bacc, huh? My friend did that too! Good, hurry up, we need you,” he said.
We need you. For a long time, I had approached my path to medicine in a way similar to the competitive aspect of auditioning. You
memorized a monologue and delivered it better than someone else to get
the principal role. But as thespians know, that ideology, at least in
the scope of performance, is not conducive to a successful show. You
have to be competent enough to get there, relentless enough to keep
trying; that is fact. But more importantly, you have to be willing to
work with and for others to create something bigger than yourself. People come to see a show to feel; I aim to perform in such a way that I have catalyzed that feeling. In
the same regard, I wanted to prove that I was capable of the academic
rigor of medicine- not for the sake of gaining credentials or
demonstrating success “in spite of” my economic or racial background,
but rather, with the intent of providing excellence in patient care.
My chance meeting (and subsequent friendship) with Tommy would restore my sense in confidence and focus. He
introduced me to Physicians for Human Rights, and he helped spawn a personal interest in
global medicine. What truly impressed me, however, was his involvement
in the Latino community of California. Tommy was part of PRIME-LC, a
program created to meet the increasing demand for
culturally sensitive and linguistically competent doctors who were in
tune to the needs of Latinos and those marginalized in medicine. Tommy
was as characteristically white as they came; Ray-ban donning,
jean-short wearing, blonde and blue eyed. But
his interest in Latino medicine stemmed from something more important
than immediate racial affiliation. He pursued PRIME-LC because he saw
firsthand the social injustice experienced by Hispanics in Spanish
Harlem, many of whom were uninsured and had difficulty seeing providers
because of a language barrier or lack of representation. Tommy reminded me that my personal experience and interest in medicine-whatever specialty-should be just that: personal. Although
Tommy passed away last year in a motorcycle accident, I am very, very fortunate to have met someone who
ignited a radical change in my perspective of myself as a potential
leader, less defined by racial parameters, and more by the motivation to
equalize those opportunities and resources available to my patients and
even to students who, much like myself, want to make a change but are
unsure if they are reaching for a goal that seems beyond their “social
or cultural archetype.”
I
admit, it is hard to turn a colorblind eye to subtle racism if we are
inundated with it every day and do not challenge it. Where someone sees
advancement in minority representation in healthcare or science, someone
else may try to undermine that by calling it a group-based advantage.
Certainly, diversity should not explicitly be perceived through a racial
lens, but gauged through the representation of unique talent and
personal experiences (cultural or otherwise) that enable future
physicians to be more understanding, approachable, and sensitive to the
concerns of more than one demographic. I
will always strive to uphold an academic caliber that is representative
of my personal sense of worth, irrespective of my color, but I am very
proud to call myself Latina, a component that inspires me to address
misunderstandings that are perpetuated through stereotypes. As
a biracial student and future osteopathic physician, I am honored and
compelled to find ways of promoting racial equality, dispelling senses
of entitlement, and showing prospective medical students that your race
is neither a limiting nor advancing factor to being a great physician. Inevitably, I'd like to
complete an international rotation in a Latin American county so that I
may interact with a patient population that I am unfamiliar with while
learning from their local physicians. I truly believe this is vital to
foster a sense of collaboration and comprehensive patient care, where
the focus is less on what you look like or what language you speak, but
rather, what services you can render to those who do not care what “box”
you checked on your college application.
My
personal investment in Latino healthcare has been cultivated by 24
years of figuring out who I would like to be, not just what my birth
certificate says I am. While there may
not be a universal language to help me linguistically address my
patients needs (my Spanish has much left to be desired), there is a
universal right that I feel compelled to work towards: equal access to
healthcare in times of need, regardless of legal or socioeconomic
status.
So whatever my Dr. “Surname” suggests (or doesn’t), perhaps I should be called Veronica. Because the most important testimony to my title will be my actions, and for that, I never needed a name.
http://news.uci.edu/features/international-man-of-medicine/
Keep it short, Happy Thursday,
V
No comments:
Post a Comment