NEW ORLEANS – Dr. Princess Dennar of Tulane University was just a child in southwestern Philadelphia when she decided to become a doctor.
Many of the children in the predominantly black neighborhood used to ride their bikes on the street, but there were few stop signs to keep them safe. She still remembers the day when one of the children was hit by a car. It took hours for an ambulance to come to help, Dennar said. If she was a doctor, she could have helped before, she remembers thinking.
Decades later, Dennar became the first black woman to head the Tulane University School of Medicine’s internal medicine and pediatrics program.
“My parents [said] there is no glass ceiling. That was the philosophy that they implanted in me, “she told NBC News.
Despite breaking down well-established barriers through her position in Tulane, Dennar was suspended last month after she filed a federal lawsuit 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 process that she suffered discrimination from 2008, when she was interviewed for the first time for a director position in the program. Dr. Lee Hamm, who is now dean of the Tulane School of Medicine and was head of the department of internal medicine at the time, reportedly told Dennar that she could only become co-director because “white medical students would not follow or favorably rate a program with a black program director. “Medical school” didn’t want to change Tulane’s face “with her in charge, the suit says.
In a statement, Tulane said that Hamm “categorically denies the racist language claims” outlined in the Dennar lawsuit. The university said it was “committed to promoting an egalitarian and inclusive community and discrimination, in any form, has no place and is not tolerated”.
The lawsuit alleges that after Dennar filed an internal complaint with the Tulane Institutional Equity Office in 2018, she received an offer to renew the contract with a proposed $ 30,000 salary cut. Her salary was restored after she complained to Tulane’s Institutional Equity Office. Dennar said he has since filed three federal complaints about Equal Employment Opportunities. She won the right to sue in two of the cases. The third complaint was made this week.
Dennar said her experience as the school’s first black principal “came with a lot of weight.”
“It also came with what I started to see as a pattern of exclusion and a pattern of abuse,” she said.
The pattern was not specific to Dennar. In her action, she also claims that Tulane’s internal student rating system, called ATLAS, ranked students who have attended historically black colleges and universities at a lower level than those who have not. Residents who were women or belonged to minority groups in Tulane received less favorable rotation schedules and were deprived of earning enough hours on certain types of training needed to graduate, according to the process.
“They were overwhelmed by not having an equal educational experience compared to their white colleagues,” Dennar told NBC News.
Tulane declined to comment on pending litigation. He said that Dennar’s suspension was based on “serious concerns raised by a special review” by an independent panel and that it is “involving an outside consultant to facilitate discussion and discovery at the School of Medicine”.
Hours before Dennar’s story aired on NBC’s “TODAY” on Tuesday morning, Hamm offered to lift Dennar’s suspension and reinstate her as the program’s director.
“This offering is based on Dr. Dennar’s acceptance of various support mechanisms to help ensure that the issues reviewed by [the Graduate Medical Education Committee] do not happen again, “Hamm said in a statement.” I am dedicated to promoting an environment where each 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 I believe that Tulane should be part of the solution. “
Dennar told NBC News that he will consider Hamm’s offer and review the terms with his lawyer, but that his concerns about racism and sexism in Tulane have not been addressed.
The reaction erupted on social media shortly after Dennar’s suspension. A hashtag, #DNRTulane, was created urging medical students not to rate Tulane during the process that future doctors go through when they are 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 value someone as powerful as Dr. Dennar, how can we convince ourselves now in medical school that at some point you will value us?” Tulane’s third-year medical student Russell Ledet said. “If you could cancel Dr. Dennar after everything she did, after everything she did, who are we?”
Even before Dennar sued, Ledet had organized a now viral photo of black medical students posing outside a Louisiana plantation. In a tweet, Ledet wrote that the students in the photo were the “wildest dreams” of his ancestors.
“In the end, an original slave neighborhood,” he wrote in the tweet, which has more than 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.
Only 5% of all doctors in the United States are black and only 3.6% of them teach in medical schools, according to a report by the American Association of Medical Colleges. Black Americans are more than 13% of the US population, according to census data.
“We have a lot more work to do in terms of valuing … diversity and what different people bring to leadership positions,” said Dr. Quinn Capers, vice president of diversity at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
Dr. Aysha Khoury, an Internet user who lives in Southern California and a former faculty member at the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine in Pasadena, is among the black doctors who are speaking publicly about racism in medical institutions. Last summer, after a black man was killed during a confrontation with the Pasadena police, the school’s heritage and diversity office asked Khoury to address the issue of prejudice in medicine during a class.
During the class, which she co-facilitated with another faculty member, Khoury shared her experiences as a black woman in medicine. She remembers her students being fully engaged and the classroom taking 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”. It was said that the decision was made by “several school leaders”.
“I remember feeling shocked and numb, not believing why they made that decision without talking to me,” she said. “I was in a lot of pain.”
The medical school, named after the first black man named CEO of the integrated managed care consortium Kaiser Permanente, denied that Khoury was suspended because of classes.
Khoury also said he was denied a promotion for which he had been considered just a few months earlier. Kaiser’s medical school refused to discuss personnel matters and did not address in the statement why Khoury was not promoted.
“The school made it clear that Dr. Khoury was not on leave because she brought anti-racism-related content into the classroom or because she shared her experiences as a black woman in medicine,” the school said in a statement by email. “In fact, we encourage our faculty to share their personal experiences and observations on anti-racism and equity, inclusion and diversity and to integrate them into class discussions.”
Asked why she decided to talk about her experience, Khoury said she refused to be “complicit” in her trauma.
“As soon as I started talking about it, I realized how hostile the medical profession is for black women,” she said. “For me, being an accomplice means that my silence allowed them to continue to do what they did to me without impunity. If I saw a teacher experience this, I wouldn’t be able to sit with my arms crossed. I couldn’t participate in his manual.”