I just finished watching episode 11 of blackish‘s seventh season, and honestly I never get bored with this show. It addresses a lot of important issues while also being funny. In this episode, Rainbow, who works at a hospital, becomes the first Black female partner there. And in the meanwhile, Dre is trying to find Black men at the advertising firm he can mentor. At first Rainbow is excited to mentor another Black woman at the hospital, but then the woman decides she’s not interested in working with her, leaving Bow with the burden of becoming a trailblazer at the hospital. She tries to get Junior’s girlfriend, Olivia, excited about going to medical school, but then opens up to Olivia about the discrimination she dealt with at medical school. Bow even finds an old letter she wrote to herself in medical school to encourage herself to not give up even when others thought she should. Even though Bow tries to put a silver lining on the adversity she faced, saying it toughened her up, Olivia knocks some sense into Bow and tells her that she shouldn’t have to take that kind of racist behavior from people to become a successful person. Olivia then asks Bow if she wasn’t occupied with trying to be a trailblazer, what she would want to accomplish. Bow reflects on this and breaks down because she remembers how exhausting it was to try to prove to her colleagues her worth as a Black female doctor in a profession with a lack of diversity.
Meanwhile, Dre tries to hire a young Black man with a well-known record in advertising in an attempt to find more Black men to mentor, but the man tells Dre he is too busy with his work at another advertising firm to take on a new position. Dre ends up making negative comments about the places this man used to work at, and the man leaves, saying he will keep his current job. Bow and Dre have a conversation, and Bow tells him the advice Olivia gave her, and admits that being a trailblazer is draining because she has to work twice as hard as others to prove her worth. Dre reflects on this, and he invites the young Black man he spoke to out for coffee. At first, the man thinks Dre is trying to push him to work for him, but then Dre tells him he just wants to talk as friends. Bow also starts finding opportunities to give her colleagues to care about diversity; she hands her white colleague a stack of pamphlets and explains that she wants other people at the hospital to care about making the hospital a more diverse and inclusive place for people of color.
I really like that Dre adopted this attitude because it showed me that a key part of being a good mentor is getting to know someone first as a person. In my current leadership role in my faith organization, I have been working to become friends with the other young women in my chapter. At first, I had a hard time connecting with many of the other young women but then I realized it was because I wasn’t asking them how they were or having casual conversations that put them at ease. I then started to open myself up more, and started telling these young ladies about the books I was reading, or what music I was listening to, or about a really good movie I watched. It made me feel less like I had to put on airs and more like I could be myself. My mentor, the philosopher and educator Daisaku Ikeda, always encourages the youth to form friendships and to treasure their friendships. I’m determined to keep encouraging these young ladies as friends, and to develop deeper bonds with them, but first I had to just be willing to have normal every day conversations with them and get to know them as people.
The episode also made a great point about being a trailblazer. Even though it’s nice to be the first, when you’re still the only minority in your field, it can be lonely a lot of times, especially when the people around you expect you to shoulder the burden of educating them on microaggressions or what it’s like being a minority in your field. I think the peaceful racial justice protests last year helped facilitate more conversations about how workplaces could become more inclusive and diverse, and also people are starting to not just focus on adding in a couple of minorities and call it a day, but focus on making workplaces anti-racist. While I don’t have any personal experience in the medical field, I found an article in Health Affairs that talked about how to make the medical profession anti-racist, and at the end of the article it had a link to an June 2020 NPR article on racism that medical students of color have to deal with. The article talks about how, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, many medical students participated in the peaceful protests against racial injustice, and it took a week of these protests for people to become more aware of the abuse that Black students and other minority students (communities of color, women, LGBTQ+) face in medical school. At the end of the article, what really sat with me was Dr. Michael Mensah’s experience at a White Coats for Black Lives protest, where medical students protested the killing of George Floyd. Because there were still few Black people working in medicine at the time of the protest, he was the only Black male there.
As the global reckoning with systemic racism last summer showed me, it’s that diversity quotas by themselves are not enough to address years of inequality and discrimination. Yes, Bow got to celebrate being a trailblazer for other Black female doctors, but it was rough for her because no one else really cared about racism or talking about the challenges Bow faced as a minority, so she felt like she had to do all the work on addressing the discrimination she faced at work. If workplaces like the hospital Bow works at want to truly support people who work for them and come from minority groups, they need to take a more proactive approach, such as colleagues educating themselves on racism and bias, and practicing empathy. I’m positive many workplaces have started doing this or have done this, but of course, when it comes to creating a more just society, dismantling years of oppression takes a lot of dialogue and a lot of coming up with different ways to address the structures on which inequality is founded. Hopefully we’ll see more of this in the next year or so.
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