B
WHITE COATS
FOR BLACK LIVES A UW medical student crusades for equity in health care BY AYAKA THORSON
60 CURB 2020
aillie Frizell would have never imagined herself to be standing before a crowd of a thousand people on a blazing hot day in mid-June. For two weeks after George Floyd’s murder, Frizell, a medical student at UW–Madison, made phone calls, distributed mass emails, gathered volunteers and sent press releases to every local media outlet to help spark a movement to dismantle systemic racism in health care. She expected no more than a few hundred people to show up outside the state Capitol to rally for the cause. But her exhaustion quickly turned to excitement as the crowd grew into a sea of a thousand white coats. At the beginning of the summer, Frizell, 23, and her mentor, Dr. Jasmine Zapata, an assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics, worked on an infant mortality research project — Wisconsin leads the nation with the highest infant mortality rate for non-Hispanic Black women. After Floyd’s death, they decided to shift gears; they needed to address everything that was going on. The coronavirus has exposed long-standing systemic health and social inequities. Black Wisconsinites are about five times more likely to be diagnosed or die from COVID-19 compared to white Wisconsinites, according to the UW Population Health Institute. Two years before the pandemic, the Wisconsin Public Health Association declared racism as a public health crisis in Wisconsin. The two women organized the statewide rally to launch UW–Madison’s Chapter of White Coats 4 Black Lives, a national student-run organization dedicated to dismantling racial inequality and racism in health care. It was an unconventional student research project — an initiative to mobilize words into meaningul actions. Medical students play an integral role in overturning one of America’s foremost public health crises: racism. “You need to start with these conversations on day one of med school as you walk in. Making sure that it’s known, that it’s important and it’s going to impact how you take care of your future patients,” Frizell says. The disparate impacts of COVID–19 on communities of color highlight the fact that people of color face discrimination in many aspects of their daily
