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NEW ORLEANS – Tulane University’s Dr Princess Dennar was just a kid from southwest Philadelphia when she decided to become a doctor.
Many children from the predominantly black neighborhood often rode their bikes on the street, but there were few stop signs to keep them safe. She still remembers the day one of the children was hit by a car. It took hours before an ambulance came to help, Dennar said. If she had been a doctor, she could have helped sooner, she remembers thinking.
Decades later, Dennar became the first black woman to lead the Internal Medicine and Pediatrics program at Tulane University School of Medicine.
“My parents [said] there is no glass ceiling. That’s the philosophy they planted in me, ”she told NBC News.
Despite breaking down established barriers through her post at Tulane, Dennar was suspended last month after filing a federal complaint against medical school in October. The lawsuit accuses Tulane of discrimination and “creating a hostile environment based on race and gender.”
Dennar alleges in the lawsuit that she was discriminated against starting in 2008, when she was first interviewed for a position of program director. Dr Lee Hamm, who is now the Dean of Tulane Medical School and who was chairman of the Department of Internal Medicine at the time, reportedly told Dennar that she could only become a co-director because “the students in White medicine wouldn’t do it. Follow or favorably rank a program with a black program director. “The medical school” didn’t want to change Tulane’s face “with her at the helm, the lawsuit says.
In a statement, Tulane said Hamm “categorically denies the allegations of racist language” exposed in Dennar’s trial. The university said it was “determined to foster an equitable and inclusive community and that discrimination in any form has no place and is not tolerated.”
The lawsuit claims that after Dennar filed an internal complaint with Tulane’s Office of Institutional Equity in 2018, she was offered a contract renewal with a proposed pay cut of $ 30,000. Her salary was restored after she complained to Tulane’s Office of Institutional Equity. Dennar said she has since filed three federal equal employment opportunity complaints. She was granted the right to sue in two of the cases. The third complaint was filed this week.
Dennar said his experience as the school’s first black principal “carried a lot of weight.”
“It also came with what I started to see as a model of exclusion and a model of abuse,” she said.
The model was not specific to Dennar. In her lawsuit, she also claims that Tulane’s internal student ranking system, called ATLAS, rated students who historically attended black colleges and universities lower than those who did not. Residents who were women or belonged to minority groups in Tulane were given less favorable rotation schedules and were deprived of earning enough hours in certain types of training needed to graduate, according to the lawsuit.
“They were overwhelmed that they did not have a fair educational experience compared to their white counterparts,” Dennar told NBC News.
Tulane declined to comment on the pending litigation. He said Dennar’s suspension was based on “serious concerns raised by a special examination” by an independent panel and that he “was hiring an outside consultant to facilitate discussion and discovery at the School of Medicine.”
Hours before Dennar’s story aired on NBC’s “TODAY” show Tuesday morning, Hamm offered to lift Dennar’s suspension and reinstate her as program director.
“This offer is based on Dr. Dennar’s acceptance of several support mechanisms to help ensure that the issues reviewed by [the Graduate Medical Education Committee] don’t happen 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 disparities in the healthcare system and believe that Tulane must be part of the solution. “
Dennar told NBC News that she would review Hamm’s offer and review the terms with her lawyer, but that her concerns about racism and sexism in Tulane were not addressed.
Backlash erupted on social media shortly after Dennar’s suspension. A hashtag, #DNRTulane, was created to call on medical students not to rank Tulane during the process that would-be physicians must go through when vying for a placement in residency programs. Another hashtag, #JusticeforDrDennar, is also circulating 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 don’t like someone as powerful as Dr Dennar, how can we be convinced right now in medical school that at some point you value us?” Russell Ledet, a third-year medical student at Tulane, said. “If you could just cancel Dr. Dennar after everything she’s done, after everything she’s done, who are we?”
Even before Dennar sued, Ledet had organized a now-viral photo of black medical students posing outside a plantation in Louisiana. In a tweet, Ledet wrote that the students pictured were the ‘wildest dreams’ of their ancestors.
“In the background, an original slave quarter,” he wrote in the tweet, which has over 20,000 likes. “In the foreground, the 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.
According to a report by the American Association of Medical Colleges, only 5% of all physicians in the United States are black and only 3.6% of those who teach in medical schools. Black Americans make up more than 13% of the American population, according to census data.
“We still have a lot of work to do in terms of valuing … diversity and what diverse people bring to leadership roles,” said Dr Quinn Capers, vice president of diversity at the University. of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
Dr. Aysha Khoury, an internist from Southern California and former founding member of the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine in Pasadena, is among black doctors who speak publicly about racism in medical facilities. Last summer, after a black man was killed in a confrontation with Pasadena police, the school’s equity and diversity office asked Khoury to look into the subject of prejudices in medicine during a course.
During the class, which she co-facilitated with another faculty member, Khoury shared her experiences as a black woman in medicine. She remembers that her students were fully engaged and the class took on 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 that his suspension was “motivated by a complaint about certain classroom activities that took place on Friday August 28”. He added that the decision had been taken by “several school heads”.
“I remember feeling shocked and numb, incredulous because they made this decision without talking to me,” she said. “I was in a lot of pain.”
The medical school, which is named after the first black man named CEO of the integrated managed care consortium Kaiser Permanente, denied that Khoury was suspended because of the class.
Khoury also said she was denied a promotion she had only been considered for a few months before. Kaiser’s medical school declined to discuss personnel matters and did not explain in the statement why Khoury had not been promoted.
“The school made it clear that Dr Khoury was not put on leave because she brought anti-racism related content into the classroom or because she shared her experiences as a than black woman in medicine, ”the school said in an emailed statement. “In fact, we encourage our teachers to share their personal experiences and observations regarding anti-racism and equity, inclusion and diversity and incorporate them into class discussions.
When asked why she decided to speak out about her experience, Khoury said she refused to be “an accomplice” to her trauma.
“Once I started talking about it, I realized how hostile the medical profession was to black women,” she said. “For me, being an accomplice means that my silence has allowed them to continue doing what they have done to me without impunity. If I saw a faculty member going through this, I couldn’t stand idly by. I couldn’t participate in their playbook. “
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