Legacy Quotes

“Today, studies show that your zip code is a much bigger determinant of health outcomes than your DNA.”
― Uché Blackstock, Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine

“Yet recent research also shows that when communities have high rates of police brutality and negative interactions with the police, community members also have a distrust of health-care institutions.”
― Uché Blackstock, Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine

“You can count the number of Black people murdered by police, but how do you account for people who die because they’re too scared to go for a regular health checkup?”
― Uché Blackstock, Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine

“As professional women, we put tremendous pressure on ourselves, as do our workplaces, loved ones, and society. For the first few years after having my children, I felt like I was barely keeping my head above water at work and at home.”
― Uché Blackstock, Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine

“The US is the wealthiest country in the world, yet we have the worst health outcomes out of any high-income country, and in part that’s because our persistent racial health inequities are so profound.”
― Uché Blackstock, Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine

“Of all forms of discrimination and inequalities, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman.”
― Uché Blackstock, Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine

“Acknowledging the differences would mean admitting there were deep systemic inequities in our society that desperately needed to be addressed.”
― Uché Blackstock, Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine

“The practice of marking neighborhoods according to the race of its inhabitants dates back to the 1930s, when the federal government decided it wanted to evaluate various residential areas across the country according to their “riskiness” for mortgage lenders. Bureaucrats at the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation sat down and decided to color-code neighborhoods according to the “danger” posed by borrowers to lenders. Neighborhoods that were considered the highest risk were marked in red—and banks were duly alerted that it was not going to be a good idea to lend money to people in those areas. These redlined areas also happened to be the parts of the country with the highest populations of Black people and other people of color and immigrants.”
― Uché Blackstock, Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine

“when we reached middle school age, our mother and father decided they wanted a more academically rigorous environment for us, and so they transferred us into a predominantly white private school about a thirty-minute bus ride away in the affluent neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights, and from there, we went to one of the top public high schools in the city, Stuyvesant High School, across the river in Manhattan.”
― Uché Blackstock, Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine