Dr. Yonette Davis, originally from Guyana, remembers her first visit to an American emergency room.
She was around 10 years old, and she had a cut on her hand from roughhousing with her brothers. When she arrived at the ER, all the doctors were white — no one working there looked like her. And though the doctors meant well, Davis recalled sensing they were a little too eager, almost excited, to see the injury and stitch her up.
“I remember feeling like I was being experimented on,” she said during an interview with the Bronx Times. From then on, Davis decided, “I’m gonna be part of the system to change the system.”
When Davis and her family came to the U.S. at age 9, they settled into Brooklyn’s Caribbean community along Flatbush Avenue. But in school, she was automatically demoted a grade because it was assumed she was coming from “a second-rate system.” And later, in a college class, a professor tried to teach students how to get rid of their accents.
But Davis stayed true to herself — and she uses that strength to help others who look and sound like her. She has been practicing medicine since 1999 and is now a physician at Oak Street Health in Soundview.
Davis said she always knew one thing: “I love being a Black woman in America.”
‘It wouldn’t look that way on my skin’
Medical school at Mount Sinai was a journey for Davis. Her childhood experiences showed her that medicine should be practiced in different ways with different people, but that was rarely emphasized in what soon-to-be doctors were learning.
Davis noticed how instruction was often geared towards people with light-colored skin. For example, she recalled studying the coloration of a rash and noting, “It wouldn’t look that way on my skin.” Nothing in the instruction seemed to have people of color at the forefront.
Davis understood that in medicine, “we have not done justice” to diverse patients. She cited historical abuses, such as the…
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