Black Man in a White Coat Read Free Page A

recall the specific joke, but it made me smile and calmed me down enough that I could eat my lunch. Racial insults—big and small—were a part of our lives and sometimes humor was the best way to deal with it.
    Yet the good feelings didn’t last. The afternoon lectures gave way to a different course, and with it, another professor. I could not concentrate at all. “Are you here to fix the lights?” played over in my mind. In high school and college, I had been mistaken many times for a potential criminal, hired help when I was a paying customer, and most favorably, as a six-foot-six budding professional basketball player. But it’s one thing to be insulted by a stranger you’ll never see again, and something altogether worse for your professor—who assigns grades that dictate your future—to cast you in such a limiting way.
    Trying to apply reason to the situation, I told myself that at Duke, Dr. Gale saw many more black maintenance workers than black men in his class. And I also firmly believed that there’s no shame in blue-collar work. My dad spent thirty-five years as a meatcutter at a grocery store while my maternal grandmother—Grandma Flossie—worked her whole life as a housekeeper, or in the parlance of her times, a cleaning lady. What bothered me was Dr. Gale’s assumption that I had no business in his class unless I arrived in some service capacity. Sensitive as I already was about my place at Duke, this incident stabbed at the core of my insecurity. With one question, Dr. Gale had shattered my brittle confidence and my tenuous feeling of belonging at Duke.
    *   *   *
    In a color-blind world, Duke might well have rejected me; at the very least, its admissions committee would not have offered me a full-tuition scholarship to its medical school.
    This troubling revelation occurred to me less than an hour into my first day on campus. The Duke Med Class of 2000 had gathered for the first time, crowded into an old lecture hall that was in its last year of use. It was a typically humid August day in North Carolina, with the temperature already approaching eighty-five degrees by mid-morning. Inside, an antiquated but powerful air conditioner chilled the room to the mid-sixties. Our eyes focused on the speaker who stood at a small lectern. An anesthesiologist by trade, she had short graying hair and spoke in a monotone that could put you to sleep without medicine. Nonetheless, the room crackled with tension. Our medical lives were about to begin.
    â€œCongratulations,” she led off. “I’m proud to say this is the most accomplished class we’ve ever had during my time at Duke.”
    Nervous laughter filled the room. On a scale of cutthroat competitiveness, future doctors are worse than Olympic hopefuls. Pre-meds arrive with better grades than those who attend law, business, or other graduate programs, and this is no coincidence. Although most schools deny it, getting into medical school is, to a large extent, about numbers. In keeping with our numerical obsessions, we craved our first glimpse of how we measured up against each other.
    She began with our college grade point averages. “The mean was 3.7 on the standard 4.0 scale,” she said, leafing through papers that defined our lives as data.
    My GPA was higher, but I discounted this edge since I had attended a less prestigious college than almost everyone around me. That realization had sunk in months earlier, during my admission interview at Yale. “I’m not sure the grades from your undergraduate college reflect what you’ll face here and beyond,” an elderly surgeon told me, his faced lined with worry as he viewed my transcript. And with that swipe of his verbal scalpel, he cut my straight-A record down to what seemed a B-minus average.
    Next up were our scores on the MCAT, the medical school equivalent of the SAT. “The average combined score was