What Are You? A Biracial Physician on Nuanced Racism
Journal: 2021/January - Annals of Family Medicine
Abstract:
A patient shouts what he suspects is my racial background at my face. A colleague repeats a patient's racist remarks against me; I lurk in my whiteness to cope. A compliment about my Asianness lands as a racist devaluation of both sides of my heritage. The medical licensing board does not include my race on its registration form. Straddling the boundary of Asian and White as a biracial female psychiatrist, I struggle to handle exoticization, discriminatory assumptions, and subtle marginalization by patients and colleagues. I grapple with the privilege of light-skinned ethnic ambiguity vs the disrespect for having features deviating from the imagined physician appearance. In this piece, I introduce a nuanced dialog about race and advocate for recognition and inclusion of biracial and multiracial minority medical practitioners who defy oversimplified racial categories.
Keywords: biracial; discrimination; physician; minorities; multiracial; race; racism.
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