Statement On Police Brutality and Commitment to Anti-Racism

We, the undersigned resident physicians and leadership at the University of North Carolina Hospitals Residency Program in Obstetrics & Gynecology, formally condemn the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery at the hands of police brutality and vigilantism. Their names lengthen an already unbearably long list of Black and brown Americans lost to white supremacy and racism and the individuals who perpetuate them.

To our Black and brown colleagues, we see you and we support you. We are committed to making UNC a safe place to work regardless of the color of your skin or how you identify. We are committed to challenging norms that marginalize or prevent Black and brown physicians from advancing wholly in their careers.

To our Black and brown medical students, we see you and we support you. We commit to making UNC a place where you can learn and thrive. We acknowledge this requires constant evaluation and correction of our own unconscious and conscious biases, and speaking out when we see bias perpetuated against you. We pledge to bring accountability to all levels of academia and the healthcare system.

To our Black and brown patients, we see you and we support you. We commit to making UNC a place where you will receive unbiased care centered on excellence. We are cognizant of the impact that a history of racism and violence has had on your and your children’s health today. We are committed to adopting practices that improve outcomes and eliminate healthcare disparities. We recognize discrimination as a risk factor for poor outcomes, and will treat it as the danger to your health that it is.

To our Black and brown communities in North Carolina and around the country, we see you and we support you. We commit to furthering our specialty’s tradition of advocacy to include intentional anti-racism and anti-violence. We respect the work you are doing and commit ourselves as partners in your struggle for justice.

Our thoughts are with the families of those we have lost, including those whose names were not elevated to a national discourse. We make these commitments in their honor. We challenge our colleagues in ob/gyn and all medical professionals to commit to anti-racist and anti-violence work. We offer the following resources as a starting point:

• So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo
• White Rage, Carol Anderson
• How To Be an Antiracist, Ibram Kendi
• Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, Brittney Cooper
• Killing The Black Body, Dorothy Roberts
• Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization, Khiara Bridges
• Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, Harriet A. Washington
• Stamped From the Beginning, Ibram Kendi
• The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander
• Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor’s Reflections on Race and Medicine, Damon Tweedy, MD
• “Toward The Abolition of Biological Race in Medicine and Public Health: Transforming Clinical Education, Research, and Practice”

Celeste Green, MD; Rodrigo Muñoz, MD; Tara Brenner, MD; Andrea Henricks, MD; Audrey Chang, MD; Michelle Ertel, MD; Jenna Adams, MD; Elizabeth Lemoine, MD; Anthony Bui, MD; Abigail Bernard, MD; Christine Field, MD; Ana Kouri, MD; Fan Lee, MD; Anna Fleischman, MD; Johnathon Recknagel, MD; Ashley Appiagyei, MD; Abbey Pfister, MD; Nozomi Sakai, MD; Susie Ahn, MD; Preston Edge, MD; Matthew Givens, MD; Miller Singleton, MD; Katelyn Rittenhouse, MD; Ariel Cohen, MD; Meredith Newton, MD; Kate Zahn, MD; Ian Flyke, MD; Austin Johnson, MD; Brittany Papworth, MD; Gina Silverstein, MD; Casey Rosser, MD; David Mysona, MD; Ayana DeGaia, MD, MPH

AnnaMarie Connolly, MD — Residency Program Director
Jes Morse, MD — Associate Program Director
Coryell Perez, MD — Associate Program Director
Ty Fraga, PhD — Residency Program Coordinator

We invite others to sign in support of this statement below: https://forms.gle/ZwsiZfu8EtwADTxD9

Supporters of the Statement