\u201cThey ask you if you\u2019re coming in to take the trash out \u2014 stuff they wouldn\u2019t ask a physician who was a white male.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By\u00a0Emma Goldberg<\/a> Aug. 11, 2020<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Dr. Onyeka Otugo was doing her training in emergency medicine, in Cleveland and Chicago, she was often mistaken for a janitor or food services worker even after introducing herself as a doctor. She realized early on that her white male counterparts were not experiencing similar mix-ups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPeople ask me several times if the doctor is coming in, which can be frustrating,\u201d said Dr. Otugo, who is now an emergency medicine attending physician and health policy fellow at Brigham and Women\u2019s Hospital in Boston. \u201cThey ask you if you\u2019re coming in to take the trash out \u2014 stuff they wouldn\u2019t ask a physician who was a white male.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n After years of training in predominantly white emergency departments, Dr. Otugo has experienced many such microaggressions. The term, coined in the 1970s by Dr. Chester Pierce<\/a>, a psychiatrist, refers to \u201csubtle, stunning, often automatic, and nonverbal exchanges which are \u2018put downs\u2019\u201d of Black people and members of other minority groups; \u201cmicro\u201d refers to their routine frequency, not the scale of their impact. Dr. Otugo said the encounters sometimes made her wonder whether she was a qualified and competent medical practitioner, because others did not see her that way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n