Photo by Joshua Wildman, taken from the NY Mag
The workplace is a strange ol’ beast. People with varying degrees of ability to do their job employ other people with varying degrees of ability to do their job in order to work towards a common goal. All while simultaneously inviting these new employees to partake in a battle royale against each other for recognition, job progression and general feelings of self-worth. Not the ideal set-up for collaborative joy, but regardless of what you think of the place the average person will spend between 90,000-110,000 hours of their waking life at work (1,2). It therefore follows that a significant proportion of your social support system, learning, development of your world view and general living of your best life actually occurs at work, and the advent of COVID-19 with its associated social isolation policies have highlighted this considerably.
However, due to the wonders of Zoom, Google Hangout and Skype, to name a few video conferencing mediums, workplaces can still continue to function, development and progression can still occur, and important conversations can still be had. Yet there appears to be one important conversation which is being avoided in workplaces the world over. The conversation around the fact that Black Lives Matter. Since the horrific murder of George Floyd on May 25th, 2020 the world has decided to wake up to the both blatant and insidious racism that is present in our society and taken up arms in the form of one of the largest civil rights movements in the history of the world (3,4). The news and social media have been awash with further cases of injustice and violence against black bodies alongside visuals of toppling statues and empowering protests. Everywhere I turn, whether I want to or not, I am forcibly reminded of what my life means to some people in this world. I see it being pushed and kicked and contorted into shapes the human body was never meant to make. I hear it pleading and crying with its last breath to be granted the same right to live as everyone else. I feel the cries of the mothers and fathers who have watched their children be murdered but know that justice is not meant for people like them.
And I know that my colleagues are seeing and hearing and feeling the exact same thing. That they too are spending night after night imbibing these images and stories. But when I arrive at work, my place of support, my place of learning, my place of developing, nobody utters a word. It’s as if the world around us isn’t burning with a passion for change. As if battered and broken people aren’t sacrificing their safety and health for the hope of a better future. It’s as if my black life actually doesn’t matter.
Because that is what your silence is saying. That I do not matter. That you see the suffering and the inequality and the persistent disenfranchisement of black people and you would prefer to continue to ignore it rather than engage with your role in it. Please do not mistake your silence for neutrality or passivism. Now more than ever, silence is an active choice of the privileged majority, and if you have decided to keep your mouth shut in your place of learning and developing then you’re an ally of the racist structures that undoubtedly uphold that workplace.
This is especially true in the medical sphere where there is a desperate need for people to acknowledge that Black Lives Matter both in the form of staff and patients. Despite the fact that the 2019 Equality and Human Rights Commission showed that 29% of black university students in the UK report experiencing racial harassment, the British Medical Association (BMA) noted that only half of the medical schools in the UK collect data on racial abuse (5,6). This resulted in the BMA producing a racial harassment charter for medical schools to attempt to address the inequalities in the BAME medical student experience caused by unaddressed insidious racism (7). This is a powerful example of what can be achieved when the collective voice is used to demand better for those in the minority and we will hopefully see the effects of this gradual dismantling of racist power structures in the medical school system in future generations.
Unfortunately, at present, the effects of systemic racism in the medical school environment have already permeated through to the clinical world, where its effects are all the more tangible and significant. The General Medical Council (GMC) in the UK identified that BAME doctors are over twice as likely to have “Fitness to Practice” referrals made against them by their employers compared to their white counterparts. This is particularly important as referrals made by employers as opposed to the public are significantly more likely to lead to the investigation and sanction of the referred clinician. This highlights the confronting race-based discrimination which is abundant in the medical workforce and the investigation itself emphasised the fact that there is a prevalent insider-outsider culture in the NHS (8).
This racial disparity is further mirrored in the patient population. In 2019 it was shown that black mothers in the UK are five times more likely to die in childbirth than white mothers (9) while black people in the UK and US are more likely to suffer from mental health issues, often as a direct result of the stressors associated with being black in an inherently racist society (10). In addition to this, it is well documented that BAME individuals are disproportionately affected by COVID-19 with a 10-50% higher death rate after correcting for age, sex, geographic location and socio-economic status. Furthermore, it has been acknowledged by the government that systemic racism has an integral role to play in these disheartening statistics (12). The driving force behind the instigation of this inquiry, as well as the push for recommendations on how to tackle the issues raised within it, was the people of the United Kingdom. It was people who watched their patients, their friends and their loved ones fall at the hands of a system that was not designed for them. So they decided to challenge that system.
And this is what you need to do. The workplace is your system. It is the place where you can make the most significant change if you begin to disentangle and understand the role you play in its racist underpinnings, alongside working to support and promote the voices of those who suffer from it. The world is crying out for change, but it’s us, and the actions we take, that will determine whether that change comes to fruition.
References
4. https://www.vox.com/2020/6/12/21285244/black-lives-matter-global-protests-george-floyd-uk-belgium