Black Man in a White Coat Read Free Page B

34,” our Duke professor announced.
    I’d scored a few points below this class average. Based on percentile rankings that she went on to explain, my result was still as good as, or better than, those of a third of my classmates, but that did nothing to prevent my empty stomach from twisting into a painful knot. While admissions committees do consider other factors, I’m fairly certain that my community service record, leadership skills, and interview performance all rated average at best. These were not the talents that made Duke offer me a scholarship.
    Things got worse as she boasted about the number of students from various prestigious colleges. “Twenty-five percent of the incoming class has an undergraduate degree from Duke,” she said.
    Another quarter came from the Ivy League, most either Harvard or Yale. Of the remainder, the vast majority hailed from other elite private colleges, such as Stanford and Johns Hopkins, or highly regarded state schools such as the University of Virginia or the nearby UNC–Chapel Hill. While I had considered many of those schools four years earlier and been accepted to several, I attended the lesser-known University of Maryland–Baltimore County. At the time, it felt like the perfect choice, as it offered a full scholarship, the opportunity for playing-time on a Division I basketball team, and was only a forty-five-minute drive to my parents’ home. But now at Duke Med, I felt like a scrawny thirteen-year-old on a basketball court with grown men.
    Why had Duke accepted me, and offered a full scholarship as enticement? As I played through the scenarios, affirmative action appeared to me the only answer. Seemingly dialed into my thoughts, the professor then turned to racial numbers:
    â€œWe have fourteen underrepresented minorities out of our total of one hundred students,” she said, as she smiled broadly. “That makes this our most diverse class ever.”
    In academic circles, underrepresented minorities include blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans; Asians are excluded from this tally because they enroll at colleges and medical school in very high proportion compared to their numbers in the U.S. population. In our class, all but one of these fourteen underrepresented minority students was black. Hispanic students tended to choose medical schools in a few large cities (New York) or states with large Hispanic populations (Texas, Florida, and California). At the time, North Carolina, and the city of Durham, had few Hispanic residents. Native Americans simply make up a very small percentage of the underrepresented minority pool, so they have little impact on the total distribution.
    I scanned the room. About half the black faces clustered in a center area near the front, with the rest scattered, as I was, throughout the lecture hall. I had met most of them months earlier, during a weekend that Duke held for admitted black applicants. At the event, black medical students, resident doctors, and faculty all descended upon us to offer assurance that we would not be racially isolated at Duke. Along with the opportunity to meet and greet prominent people at the school, current black students had organized informal gatherings that featured common African-American themes: barbecue at the local park, pickup basketball games, and a venture to a trendy nightclub. They did everything to show that they wanted us badly.
    Duke was not alone in its efforts to recruit black medical students. Johns Hopkins filled our recruitment weekend with similar engagements, and it had a few aces that Duke lacked. Levi Watkins Jr., a black cardiac surgeon who implanted the first automatic defibrillator in a human, led the festivities. Our experience culminated with brunch at the estate of Ben Carson, the famed neurosurgeon then known best for separating conjoined twins. Even then, his story of triumph over childhood hardship had spawned a career unto itself with lucrative