I have been accused of racism or racist acts three times. Each accusation hurt, and I remember each interaction vividly.
The first time was in my final year of my Family Medicine residency. A few days before, at a meeting of all the doctors in training, we had been encouraged to have patients get their care from a single doctor. Continuity of care is the backbone of family medicine, and the program director wanted us to get that experience. Staff were instructed to schedule patients accordingly.
With that fresh in my mind one morning, I walked into the room of a patient I had never seen before. Looking at his chart before I entered the room, I saw that he had been assigned to one of my colleagues, Dr. Nahin. I made a mental note to address this during the visit and walked in to greet the patient.
The patient, a young man in his twenties who happened to be black, was slouched in a chair waiting for me. I greeted him, sat down, and asked him why he was there. He told me he needed some forms filled out for the state. As I looked over the paperwork, I asked him, “Is there a reason you are seeing me instead of Dr. Nahin?”
“Why you ask?” He replied.
“We are trying to encourage patients to see the same doctor every time they come to the clinic, and I was wondering how you ended up seeing me today,” I replied.
A sneer came across his face as he answered me, “Oh. I get it. It’s a Rodney King thing.”
“Excuse me?” I was incredulous. Race had not for a moment entered my mind.
“It’s because I’m black.” Stunned, my mind raced, searching for the appropriate response. I was angry and offended. It was an insult like no other I had experienced. I did not know what to say, but I did know what I wanted to do. I had to get out of that room before I lost my cool. I asked him if he had any emergent needs, anything that had to be taken care of that day. When he said “No”, I told him to leave the office.
“Nobody calls me a racist!” I replied with a shaky voice as I opened the door and walked out, leaving him stunned in his chair. (Looking back, I don’t think my response was the best one, but it was the best I could come up with at the time. I felt that he needed to know that he shouldn’t casually accuse people of something so terrible.)
The second accusation came 5 years later. I had just joined two other doctors in a private practice in Huntington Beach. They were great guys and excellent doctors, but terrible businessmen. It took only a few months for them to ask me to take over the management of the practice. I immediately learned that we had problems with our office manager. The two doctors had almost $200,000 in uncollected payments!
I began to investigate and soon found the problem. The office manager did not know what she was doing. She was nice, and sweet, and wonderful with people, but she was terrible at her job. Patients were not being charged at the time of service, nor were they asked about past due balances when they came in for follow up. If she did not know how to bill for a service, she simply didn’t. I found dozens of bills in her desk that had never been submitted to insurance.
It was clear she had to go, but there were obstacles. She was black, she was pregnant, and she had been given excellent reviews in the past. I was afraid to fire her, fearful that if I did I would be accused of racial bias. I couldn’t fire her, but I had to get her out of the manager position. I was told that she was an excellent employee before being promoted to manager, so I devised a plan.
While she was out on maternity leave, I hired a new office manager to replace her. When she returned to work, I told her that as the practice was growing, we wanted someone with more experience running the office. We moved her to the front desk, telling her that out of respect we would keep her at the same pay. As I genuinely liked her, I hoped the problem had been solved.
She did not take it well. In a passive-aggressive way, she made her dissatisfaction known by deliberately moving as slowly as possible. Phone calls that took other employees 30 seconds somehow took her 5 minutes. Other employees picked up calls on the first ring, she would wait until someone else took the call and then say, “Oh, I was going to get that!”
I talked to her repeatedly and was repeatedly met with excuses. She told me that I did not know what I was talking about. I was forced to write her up again and again. Only the fear of retribution kept her from being fired. Finally, I moved her again, this time into the back office. I told her, “Dr. Besley says you were a wonderful nurse, so we thought we would move you back here.” Again, we did so without cutting her pay.
She quit a few days later. Not long after that I received notice from the Department of Fair Housing and Employment that she had filed a discrimination complaint against me. I could not believe it. If there had been any bias, it had been in her favor! If she had been white, I would have let her go weeks earlier. It was because I did not want to be thought a racist that I had worked so hard to keep her on.
Fortunately for us, the person from the Department saw things our way. After reviewing her file, she asked me, “Why didn’t you just fire her!”
“Because I did not want to end up talking to you!” was my reply.
A few years after that we had two medical assistants working in our office through a temp agency. We had one employee out on leave as well as one permanent opening in the office. Both temp nurses seemed excellent, and as the time approached for the person on leave to return the office manager and I realized we had a decision to make. While both of the temps were worthy of a full-time job, we could only choose one. One of them happened to be black and the other was white.
One day at lunch I sat in the manager’s office so we could review their performance. Neither of us could point to anything that separated the two. “So, let’s offer the job to the one who has been here longer!” I declared. The difference was only a few days, but it was all we could come up with. The black nurse had started working us first, so I decided to offer her the job when she returned from lunch.
She didn’t come back. When we called and asked her where she was, she told the office person, “I don’t want to work for such a racist office!” Needless to say, I was puzzled!
Over the last several months, multiple stories of alleged racism have proliferated. It seems that any interaction between a person of color and someone white is stained with accusations of bias. In addition, we are now told that we live in a racist nation, that our entire justice system discriminates against minorities.
While I do not doubt for a moment that there are racists in this country, both in government and in private institutions, I struggle with these widespread allegations. I struggle because racism is an attitude of the heart, and I cannot know the hearts of others.
I understand for example, that each person who accused me of being a racist truly believed I was one. Previous experiences had put them on guard. Having experienced racism, or having heard stories of racism, they knew that I was acting in a racist way.
Except I wasn’t. I may have been awkward, or mean, or just a jerk. I may have acted rudely, or insensitively, or smugly. I do not know how my actions came across, but I do know that my heart was in the right place. In none of the interactions did the color of a person’s skin have a negative impact on my responses.
The problem is that I was never given a chance to share my heart. I was either not asked for my reasons, or had my reasons dismissed out of hand. The others did not care to know what was in my heart. They lumped me in with others they knew or had heard about, and in that context passed judgments on me.
It does not have to be this way. A few months ago, one of my black patients showed my how he avoided living in a racist world. A very dark-skinned man from West Africa, he has lived in Huntington Beach for a few years. At the time of his visit, a story of possible racism was everywhere in the news, so I decided to broach the subject with him.
I asked his permission to ask him a personal question, in so doing giving him permission to not answer me, and asked, “Huntington Beach is one of the whitest towns there is. Do you ever feel you are a victim of racism?”
“Never,” he replied, “Everybody is nice.”
“Really?”, I replied, “You don’t feel, for example, that you have been pulled over for the color of your skin?”
“Oh, I been pulled over a few times, but I just figure they are doing their jobs. I just do what they say, and I never have a problem.”
His approach surprised me. In my mind, the odds favored that on at least one of the occasions he had been pulled over, some form of racial profiling must have occured. From what I had heard in the news, how could it not have been?
But he didn’t see it that way. He didn’t see it that way because he chose not to. He chose to believe the best in others, and to never assign bad motives to anyone. If he does not know what’s in someone’s heart, he refuses to judge them or condemn them.
What a lesson for all of us. He is living out a verse from the book of James that has always been a challenge to me. “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to be angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires.”
May we all be people who listen, people who are slow to anger. May we assume the best in others whenever possible.
May we also assume the best in our nation and in its laws, in our leaders and in our police. If we don’t, we may end up living in a very angry world.
Bart