“Legacy is an
illuminating and stirring journey of a book.” —Ibram X. Kendi, #1
New York Times-bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist
The
rousing, captivating story of a Black physician, her career in
medicine, and the deep inequities that still exist in the U.S.
healthcare system
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.