Two years ago, in the wake of an incident in which a black woman doctor attempted to render medical aid and was dismissed due to doubt that she was a physician, IJFAB Blog featured a post on the issue of young black women not fitting the social imaginary of what a doctor looks like.

On Tuesday, October 30 of 2018, Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford was on a flight when she noticed a nearby passenger in distress and began rendering assistance. Flight staff approached and expressed doubt that she ought to be involved. She produced her medical license. “Are you a head doctor?” one of them asked. “Are you actually an M.D.?” A flight staff member then asked if the license was really hers. Dr. Stanford later said that she carries the medical license with her at all times because “I know I don’t look the part.”

This image is a screenshot from The Nov 2, 2018 New York Times article on this event.

We have here a case of the most profound doubt about the expertise and trustworthiness of black women. Philosophers call this epistemic injustice, which involves doubt in persons as knowers and knowledge producers, as well as in the reliability of persons’ testimony. Black feminists have long written of this phenomenon’s application to black women, notably including sociologist Patricia Hill Collins’ influential work on why black women are not included in the canons of knowledge producers.

Not only was Dr. Stanford not imagined to be what a doctor looks like, but she also could not be believed when she testified  that in fact she was a physician. This doubt in the possibility that black women can be educated experts is particularly ridiculous given that they are the most highly educated subpopulation in the United States. Of course, prejudice doesn’t draw its power from reality.

There is an additional dimension to this interaction, and it has to do with the certainty of people that they must know more than a black woman does. Consider the flight attendant who asked “are you a head doctor?” This is not a typical term in American medicine, where terms such as Attending Physician or Chief Attending Physician or Chief Medical Officer are commonly used to indicate higher rank in a hospital setting. Yet when Dr. Stanford seemed confused by the question of whether she was a “head doctor”, this was taken not as evidence that the questioner might lack relevant knowledge but that instead Dr. Stanford lacked relevant knowledge. The flight staff, over several encounters, took up important time to question Dr. Stanford rather than rendering aid to the passenger in distress or allowing Dr. Stanford to do so uninterrupted. This is a rather remarkable investment of time and effort to not allow a black woman to be an expert.
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This encounter is sadly not unusual. Black women physicians live at the intersection of being women physicians and black physicians. Women physicians are still, even in hospital settings, liable to be assumed to be nurses. And while nurses play an important role, let us sit for a minute with the knowledge that it is gender stereotypes that are driving the too-common assumption that women physicians are nurses. Doubt of black people’s testimony and social status is widespread in the US. To be a black woman physician is to have doubt in one’s status as a physician and as a trustworthy source of testimony not just doubled, but compounded by this intersectionality.

We cannot possibly prevent ourselves and each other from acting on negative stereotypes about black women as knowers (or women as knowers or black people generally as knowers) if we do not know how they can operate to do harm. Just knowing won’t make us do better, but it is a necessary condition for doing better.

These instances, and there are countless ones daily that do not get coverage in the New York Times, are a result not of individual racist misogynists but of racist and sexist bias rooted in our very conceptions of who can be seen as a knower. Our society must shift the social imaginary, and we can be part of that. But there really is also individual responsibility to observe these habits of thought in ourselves, to subject our own reasoning and behavior to careful inspection, and to get in the habit of slowing down before we react.

I want to make one last comment here about who this “we” is. It’s not simply white folks, like me, though it definitely includes white folks. This “we” is anyone. An old friend of mine who is an accomplished lawyer was queried recently coming back into the US by Customs and Border  Patrol. When asked what her occupation was, she said she was a lawyer. The CBP agent, who was a woman of color, said, “Are you really a lawyer?” in disbelief.  Of such incidents, a black woman with years of experience working to shift systemic/institutional racism wrote “Thing about this supremacist structure we’ve so carefully built, is that we learn how to devalue ourselves in it, perpetuating their system, without [those on top of it] even getting their hands dirty.” So this “we” isn’t just a white we. It’s the we of American society and other societies that follow similar patterns of distrusting certain groups as knowers.

It should be unusual, rather than all too common, for someone to be surprised or suspicious when a black woman physician claims to be exactly what she is.