“Times have changed.”
The person telling me this over Zoom was, like me, a middle-aged white doctor and privileged. But despite our shared experiences, this physician, chairman of a hospital department to which I’d just delivered a Grand Rounds lecture, was taking on the role of unsolicited mentor, giving me feedback that might be “helpful” after the talk.
His problem with my lecture? “The part when you talked about race.”
The majority of Grand Rounds talks in medical centers involve the latest scientific breakthroughs or insights about diseases. In contrast, lectures I’ve given since my book “Exhale” was published are more humanities discussions on what I’ve learned on the front lines of medicine — about accountability, perseverance, the sanctity of human life and the inequities present in underserved communities.
Part of that is how racial disparities impact health-care delivery. Since this was a talk about my experiences, I told the story of when I approached a black mother about consenting to donate her brain-dead son’s organs after he’d suffered a gunshot wound. She refused, which I couldn’t understand.
Yet I soon came to realize that her decision was about distrust — of me and the white medical establishment. She likely thought that we could’ve saved her son (we couldn’t; he was already dead), but that we instead sought to use his organs for a more deserving patient, perhaps a more deserving white patient.
That prompted me to look more closely at the issue, one that I ultimately spent hundreds of hours studying through my own research and countless conversations with thought leaders in this area. So how did my lecture miss the mark?
“You didn’t spend enough time talking about race,” the department chairman said.
In a talk about a career journey, no subject, no matter how worthy, can be covered in the detail it deserves. So much from my professional life was relevant here and needed to be talked about. But in some of our finest medical centers — and beyond — everything, it seems, has to be about race, even if not everything is.
If everything is about race, then nothing is about race. And we know that’s not true either.
My discussion with this department chair was actually counterproductive, if the goal is more social justice. By falling prey to the language police and moral superiority so rampant in some institutions — especially academia — we’re going backward, inhibiting open conversations instead of encouraging them and pretending that any of us has the corner on morality.
When we’re creating an environment where so many fear that their words and thoughts may not be “good enough,” some will choose to remain silent, leaving important voices out of the public conversation, stifling creativity, as opposed to promoting it.
When I make my thoughts public, I want to hit the mark — and am disappointed when I don’t. The problem is, after a long career at the highest levels in academic medicine and now as a writer, I’m not sure what the mark is anymore.
Trying to “know my audience” is becoming increasingly difficult because I’m not convinced the loudest voices in the audiences know best how to achieve their/our objective: a more just society.
Their cause — and more to the point, my cause — will not be advanced by simply being perpetually offended, especially by those like me who are naturally sympathetic to the goals of these self-proclaimed arbiters of what is right or wrong in our society.
So: Am I afraid at this point of being canceled? No. The way I’ve conducted myself I hope speaks for itself, but I will resist the temptation to run through my race résumé when challenged in this way.
The more likely outcome is that I will be tempted to self-cancel, to stop talking and writing about subjects like inequities in medicine and the fragmented nature of health care.
That would be a shame — and something I must resist.
Dr. David Weill is principal of the Weill Consulting Group and author of “Exhale: Hope, Healing and a Life in Transplant.”