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.

Oranicha Jumreornvong, center, took to the microphone at an Anti-Asian Hate rally in March.

The rise in Asian hate crimes—including an assault she experienced herself—has transformed third-year medical student Oranicha Jumreornvong into an outspoken advocate for the rights of Asians in the United States.

In March, Ms. Jumreornvong helped organize an anti-hate rally in New York City on behalf of White Coats Against Asian American and Pacific Islanders Hate. The rally drew an estimated 1,000 supporters, including Senator Charles Schumer, D-NY; New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang; and 100 health care workers, including 50 classmates from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. On Wednesday, April 14, she will be among the speakers at a Town Hall Meeting sponsored by The Mount Sinai Hospital Diversity Council.

“Speaking out is not really an option in Thailand, where I’m from,” says Ms. Jumreornvong, 26, who grew up under military dictatorships and widespread censorship. She arrived in the United States in 2014 as an undergraduate at Stanford University. All of her family members live in Thailand. “Thai people learn to minimize things to try to get along,” she adds. “In the past, I would advocate through research but not by public speaking because it conflicts with my own upbringing of trying not to stir up problems.”

But her reluctance to speak out against hate ended abruptly on a chilly morning in February, on the Icahn Mount Sinai campus, at 97th Street and Madison Avenue. That is when a stranger wearing a mask yelled “Chinese virus” at her before following her, kicking her, and dragging her across the pavement, as bystanders looked on. The attacker grabbed Ms. Jumreornvong’s cell phone and ran off. The police have not yet found him.

“I was on my way to get my first COVID-19 vaccine at Mount Sinai before returning to work at the hospital later that day,” says Ms. Jumreornvong. “I had a coat on over my scrubs. I told him, ‘I’m a medical student,’ and at first he seemed okay with that and I thought he would leave me alone. But then he didn’t.” After the attack, Ms. Jumreornvong’s mentors in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine and Human Performance checked on her via telemedicine and a friend who is a resident in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation tended to her wounds

Ms. Jumreornvong had been the victim of a bias incident several months earlier, while she was in between shifts at Mount Sinai Morningside. She was alone on a bench eating a granola bar when a woman pushing a child in a stroller told her to put her mask on and go back to China.

Support from friends and mentors outside and within the Mount Sinai community has helped ease her pain. “Mount Sinai has always been supportive emotionally and in terms of advocacy work,” she says. After her assault, Mount Sinai’s medical students started a petition to denounce anti-Asian hate and the Health System quickly embraced it. “I feel like Mount Sinai has provided me with this privilege—this platform to speak out—and that I have to do something, and by helping others I’m also healing.”

Oranicha Jumreornvong, front row, fourth from the left, and her colleagues from White Coats Against Asian American and Pacific Islanders Hate, drew an estimated 1,000 supporters to their rally in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood.

In raising awareness about anti-Asian hate, Ms. Jumreornvong wants the public to view the Asian community as a diverse group of people. There is a lot of poverty among Asian groups, she says, and many are underrepresented in medicine and other professions.

“I think the first step to healing is to recognize there is a problem, and I implore everyone to stop viewing the Asian American Pacific Islander community as a model community of wealthy and educated people and, instead, as a heterogeneous group,” she says. She would like to see the establishment of scholarships that help underrepresented Asian groups and the elimination of health disparities that exist in poor Asian American communities. She would also like the U.S. medical community to recognize some of its own unconscious biases.

After her painful experiences in the United States, Ms. Jumreornvong’s father in Thailand was concerned for her safety. She assured him that she would be all right.

“As an immigrant, I have an American dream too,” she says. “America is so diverse and you see people of different colors and ethnicities come together. I consider this my second home, so I don’t want to leave it. You can choose to weigh yourself down with bitterness. I think it’s easier on the soul to heal through kindness and resilience.”