During the week leading up to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai’s 52nd Annual Commencement on Friday, May 14, medical student Rachel Wilkinson held a virtual “fireside chat” with historian and educator Lonnie G. Bunch, III, PhD, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. At Icahn Mount Sinai’s Commencement, Ms. Wilkinson received her medical degree, and Dr. Bunch—Founding Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016—was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters.
Their 50-minute discussion centered on race and history and how the COVID-19 pandemic and the death of George Floyd will be remembered by future generations. Without a doubt, Dr. Bunch said, the past 18 months mark one of the most important periods in American history.
Dr. Wilkinson: How will the story of 2020-2021 be told in years to come?
Dr. Bunch: George Floyd’s murder, the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, the devastation of COVID-19 on Americans generally and on people of color specifically—that is something historians will be writing about for generations to come. There are many moments in history that are an inflection point, where it illuminates all the dark corners of our experience, and that’s what these last two years have done: they’ve forced us to confront so many things etched by racism.
The challenge for historians is what will happen. Is this going to be a sprint that ends or a long wave that allows us to be a more transformative and fairer nation? Are we a country that lives up to our ideals or the country that realizes fairness is limited and only certain people have access to the American dream?
Dr. Wilkinson: Is there something missing that people are getting wrong about the past year and a half?
Dr. Bunch: You want people to realize this is not someone else’s story, but their story too, regardless of race, regardless of how long their family has been in this country. If we can get people to realize we’re in this together then there’s hope for a future.
Dr. Wilkinson: Thousands of us are graduating this year as doctors and biomedical scientists, and we’re trying to understand what our role should be in combating racism. What do you see as the role of health care providers?
Dr. Bunch: The fundamental challenge is that the public health profession has used people of color as subjects rather than patients, and there is concern about fairness within the health care system. Your profession needs to embrace its history. Your profession needs to understand that it has contributed to some of the best and some of the worst outcomes in health care. Understand it, own it, and begin to look internally at what that means—a broader, more inclusive group of people going through medical school. Your job is to master your profession and to recognize that it’s not enough to be a good doctor; you’ve got to be a good person and fight the good fight.
Dr. Wilkinson: Where does medical education fit into confronting racism or injustice, overall?
Dr. Bunch: I hear many doctors say it’s a personal choice how you live your life, eat, and exercise. But it’s also a fact that if you live in Princeton, New Jersey, versus living in Trenton, New Jersey, you have a much longer life expectancy. We have to confront these issues and make sure we create a culture where health care is accessible and given fairly to all. It means you’re going to have to confront structural racism and assumptions, and when people of color come into an emergency room you’re going to have to think about them a little differently than what your initial reaction might be, that you’re being fair in giving them the treatments they need.
Dr. Wilkinson: How can health systems push the envelope on racial justice?
Dr. Bunch: I don’t want to hear doctors saying, “I can’t get out of my lane.” Your lane is really the whole system of health care. The health care community has a lot of power, a lot of resources. John Lewis (the late politician and civil rights leader), used to say to me, “Despair slows you down.” For the medical profession it’s time to own the challenge.
Dr. Wilkinson: What are you most proud of in terms of our nation’s progress toward racial justice?
Dr. Bunch: As a historian, what’s clear to me is that America has moved in dramatic ways. What I take from history is the sense that change is possible but change is not permanent. We’ve seen moments of great leaps forward and moments of moving back. What concerns me the most is the belief that success for an individual means success for all, and that’s not true. There are people of all genders and races who you can point at and say, “Look, we have a woman CEO of a Fortune 500 company, or we have an African American.” Individual success is key, but until that trickles down to the entire community it really is just an anomaly, not the way it should be. You’re only successful if the group furthest removed from success is beginning to reap the benefit of that success.
Dr. Wilkinson: Where do we find sources of hope?
Dr. Bunch: I find hope in history. History is a reservoir I dip into and I see (the abolitionist and statesman) Frederick Douglass and Madam C.J. Walker (the first Black female millionaire in America). People who didn’t give up, people who should have given up. I also get hope from people like you and my daughter (an emergency medicine physician), people who are doing things I could never have imagined, people who say, “I will be the best in my profession and the best person of color I can be.” When I talk to people around the world—from Italy and Israel and London—and I hear them saying, “Black lives matter.” I take hope from the fact that we’re now in a world where it’s harder to keep secrets. By illuminating examples of horrible moments you can change and address those.
Dr. Wilkinson: What motivated you to take on the massive challenge of building the National Museum of African American History and Culture?
Dr. Bunch: This idea of building a museum was floating around for 100 years and began with Black Civil War veterans saying, “Why not tell our story too?” I realized if we could build a national Museum of African American History and Culture on the Mall (in Washington, D.C.) as part of the Smithsonian, that would nurture the souls of my ancestors so that African Americans would not be seen as an ancillary story but central to who we are as Americans. It’s not just a story of woe is me or pain. It’s a story of resiliency.
My favorite part of the museum is helping people understand how important slavery is to all of us—that these are people whose lives dramatically altered America. Resiliency is really at the heart of the Black experience.
