Sam Gurwitt Photo
Jose Paez and Darin Latimore.
Jose Paez has been a child psychiatry fellow at the Yale School of Medicine for only three months, and he’s already been singled out as a person of color.
He was walking with a group of white colleagues, and was asked to show his ID when his white colleagues went ignored. He said ID checks that feel discriminatory and targeted like that happen to him frequently.
Paez was one of about 60 people who stood around the steps of Sterling Hall of Medicine Thursday afternoon for a short gathering in the wake of the decision by a Kentucky grand jury to not charge the officers who shot and killed Breonna Taylor.
Paez did not step up to a megaphone Thursday afternoon to tell the stories of discrimination he has faced in his short months at Yale. He had gotten up to say what gives him hope: the youth he works with.
“To show them that we can make it to these places and we can model for them the things that we want them to be,” he said, is what gives him hope and keeps him coming to work.
A crowd dotted with white lab coats, blue nurse’s slacks, and blue surgical masks stood before him. Next to him, holding a megaphone, was Darin Latimore.
Latimore, who is deputy dean of diversity and inclusion at the medical school and an associate professor for general internal medicine, had sent an email Thursday morning to the medical school community asking people to gather to honor Breonna Taylor.
“When I heard the news last night, I was profoundly affected to the point of no sleep last night,” he said. If the news had affected him so much, he said, it must have affected others as well. “One way to start healing is to create community,” he said, so he organized the brief lunchtime gathering sandwiched between the school and the food trucks on Cedar Street.
Racism shows itself very clearly in medicine, he said. “In healthcare, it’s very visible, and quite frankly, it’s life and death,” he said, referring to disparities in health, and healthcare outcomes, that vary along racial and socio-economic lines.
Physicians hold a place of respect, he said, and “there is no reason our voice could not be lent to solving some of those problems that lead to inequality in healthcare.”
Latimore held a megaphone, and invited speakers up one by one. After each one, there was a long pause as people digested what they had heard and a few bucked up the courage to step forward.
Laura Fuller-Weston (pictured), a nursing aide in pathology, said she is raising six children of color.
“I’m terrified for them. We are leaving them something less than what our parents left to us. It’s getting worse and worse,” she said.
Her nephew recently ran away after a dispute with his parents, she said. “All I could think was: He’s in Brooklyn, and the police don’t care. I couldn’t call the police and say, ‘Help me.’ Because if I call the police to say, ‘Help me,’ he might not ever come home.”
Her brother is a SWAT officer in Philadelphia, she said. He is trying to be the change he would like to see in law enforcement.
Even so, she said, she is still afraid.
“I can’t tell my children they can go to a uniform anymore and say that it’s safe if you’re lost and you need help,” she said. “I can’t say go to a uniform and my brother wears that uniform and I’m terrified. But I refuse to give up hope. I refuse.”
Her eyes began to fill with tears.
“And I’m going to raise them to be the change that they want to see in this world,” she said. “It starts with this community. It starts with this entitled community.”