Griot African-American Book Discussion

Legacy by Uché Blackstock

The Griot Book Discussion features books by African-American authors. April's selection: Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine by Uché Blackstock.

Attend in person or virtually via Zoom. Print copies of the book are available for checkout at the Eola Road Branch Adult Reference Desk on the 2nd floor. Email group facilitator Becky Clark at rclark@aurorapubliclibrary.org for more information.

Join us virtually here.

Book description:

Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine by Uché Blackstock, MD

Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, it never occurred to Uché Blackstock and her twin sister, Oni, that they would be anything but physicians. In the 1980s, their mother headed an organization of Black women physicians, and for years the girls watched these fiercely intelligent women in white coats tend to their patients and neighbors, host community health fairs, cure ills, and save lives. What Dr. Uché Blackstock did not understand as a child—or learn about at Harvard Medical School, where she and her sister had followed in their mother’s footsteps, making them the first Black mother-daughter legacies from the school—were the profound and long-standing systemic inequities that mean just 2 percent of all U.S. physicians today are Black women; the racist practices and policies that ensure Black Americans have far worse health outcomes than any other group in the country; and the flawed system that endangers the well-being of communities like theirs. As an ER physician, and later as a professor in academic medicine, Dr. Blackstock became profoundly aware of the systemic barriers that Black patients and physicians continue to face. Legacy is a journey through the critical intersection of racism and healthcare. At once a searing indictment of our healthcare system, a generational family memoir, and a call to action, Legacy is Dr. Blackstock’s odyssey from child to medical student to practicing physician—to finally seizing her own power as a health equity advocate against the backdrop of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. (publisher description)

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