NEW ORLEANS – Dr. Princess Dennar of Tulane University was just a child in Southwest Philadelphia when she decided to become a doctor.
Many of the children in the predominantly black neighborhood regularly rode their bicycles down the street, but there were few stop signs to keep them safe. She still remembers the day when one of the children was hit by a car. It took hours before an ambulance came to help, Dennar said. If she was a doctor, she would be able to help sooner, she thinks.
Decades later, Dennar became the first black woman to head the Tulane University School of Medicine’s internal medicine and pediatrics program.
“My parents [said] there is no glass ceiling. “That was the philosophy they instilled in me,” she told NBC News.
Despite the fact that the established barriers were broken by her position in Tulane, Dennar was suspended last month after she filed a federal lawsuit against the medical school in October. The lawsuit accuses Tulane of discrimination and “creating a racially and gender-based hostile environment.”
Dennar claims in the lawsuit that she experienced discrimination from 2008 when she first interviewed for a director position at the program. Lee Hamm, who was now dean of Tulane’s School of Medicine and at the time chair of the internal medicine division, reportedly told Dennar that she could only become co-director because ‘white medical students do not want to do that. follow or arrange a program with a black program director. ‘The medical school does not want to change Tulane’s face, with her at the helm, the lawsuit alleges.
In a statement, Tulane said Hamm “categorically denies the allegations of racist language” as set out in Dennar’s lawsuit. The university said it was “committed to promoting a just and inclusive community, and discrimination, in whatever form, has no place and is not tolerated.”
The lawsuit alleges that after Dennar filed an internal complaint with Tulane’s Office of Institutional Equity in 2018, a renewal of the contract was offered with a proposed saving of $ 30,000. Her salary was restored after she complained to Tulane’s institutional equity office. Dennar said she has since filed three federal complaints about equal opportunities. She won the right to sue in two of the cases. The third complaint was lodged this week.
Dennar said her experience as the school’s first black director ‘has a lot of weight’.
“It also came with what I started to see as a pattern of exclusion and a pattern of abuse,” she said.
The pattern was not specific to Dennar. In her lawsuit, she also claims that Tulane’s internal ranking system for students, called ATLAS, rates students who have historically attended black colleges and universities lower than those who have not. Residents who were female or belonged to minority groups in Tulane were given less favorable rotation schedules according to the lawsuit and were deprived of earning enough hours in certain types of training that they had to complete.
“They had the burden of not having a fair educational experience compared to their white counterparts,” Dennar told NBC News.
Tulane declined to comment on pending litigation. Dennar’s suspension is said to be based on ‘serious concerns raised by a special panel’ of an independent panel and that he is ‘engaging an external consultant to facilitate discussion and discovery at the School of Medicine.’
Hours before Dennar’s story aired on NBC’s program “TODAY” on Tuesday morning, Hamm offered to lift Dennar’s suspension and re-appoint her as program director.
‘This offer is based on the acceptance of dr. Dennar of various support mechanisms to help ensure issues reviewed by [the Graduate Medical Education Committee] does not occur again, “Hamm said in a statement. I am committed to fostering an environment where every member of our community can work, learn and thrive. I am committed to our important work to end racial differences in the health care system and believe that Tulane should be part of the solution. ‘
Dennar told NBC News that she would consider Hamm’s offer and review the terms with her lawyer, but that her concerns about racism and sexism in Tulane would not be addressed.
Setbacks erupted on social media shortly after Dennar was suspended. A hashtag, #DNRTulane, has been created that appeals to medical students not to rank Tulane during the process that doctors have to undergo when competing in the residency programs. Another hashtag, #JusticeforDrDennar, is also doing the distribution on Twitter. Both hashtags drew hundreds of responses from other black students and doctors eager to share their stories of discrimination in the medical field.
“If you do not appreciate someone as powerful as Dr. Dennar, how can we now be convinced in medical school that you will appreciate us at some point?” a third-year medical student in Tulane, Russell Ledet, said. “If you can just cancel Dr. Dennar after all she’s accomplished, after all she’s done, who are we?”
Even before Dennar sued, Ledet arranged a now-viral photo of black medical students posing outside a Louisiana plantation. In a tweet, Ledet writes that the students in the photo are their ancestors’ “wildest dreams”.
“In the background, an original slave quarters,” he wrote in the tweet, which has more than 20,000 likes. “In the foreground, original descendants of slaves and medical students.”
More than a year after sharing the photo, Ledet said, “we need more doctors in our city.”
“We specifically need more black doctors in our city for our patients,” he added.
Only 5 percent of all physicians in the U.S. are black and only 3.6 percent of those who teach in medical schools, according to a report by the American Association of Medical Colleges. According to census data, black Americans make up more than 13 percent of the U.S. population.
“We have a lot more work to do in terms of appreciation … diversity and that brings diverse people to leadership positions,” said Dr. Quinn Capers, vice president of diversity at the University of Texas at Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
Dr. Aysha Khoury, an internist in Southern California and a former founding member of the faculty at the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine in Pasadena, is one of the black doctors who speaks publicly about racism at medical institutions. Last summer, after a black man was killed during a confrontation with Pasadena police, the school’s equity and diversity office asked Khoury to weave in the topic of prejudice in medicine during a class.
During the class, which she presented with another faculty member, Khoury shared her experiences as a black woman in medicine. She remembers her students were fully engaged and the classroom got an emotional air because ‘it was an emotional topic’.
That night, Khoury was suspended from teaching. On September 1, the school sent a letter to Khoury saying her suspension was “led by a complaint about certain classroom activities that took place on Friday, August 28.” It is said that the decision was taken by ‘several school leaders’.
“I remember being shocked and numb, disbelieving because they made the decision without talking to me,” she said. “I was in a lot of pain.”
The medical school, named after the first black man named CEO of the integrated care consortium, Kaiser Permanente, denied that Khoury was suspended due to the class.
Khoury also said she was denied a promotion for which she had only been considered months before. Kaiser’s medical school did not want to discuss staffing issues and did not say in the statement why Khoury is not being promoted.
“The school is clear that Dr. Khoury was not placed on leave because she brought content related to anti-racism to the classroom or because she shared her experiences as a black woman in medicine,” the school said in a statement. email statement said. “We encourage our faculty to share their personal experiences and observations regarding anti-racism and fairness, inclusion and diversity and to weave them into the class discussions.”
Asked why she decided to express her experience, Khoury said she refuses to be ‘complicit’ in her trauma.
“When I first started talking about it, I realized how hostile the medical profession is to black women,” she said. ‘To be sympathetic to me means that my silence could keep them doing what they did to me with impunity. If I saw a member of the faculty experience this, I would not be able to sit idle. I could not participate in their playbook. “