LAUSR

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd screamed out for his dead mother minutes before he died while being choked under the knee a Minneapolis police officer. His once vibrant life was snuffed out and reduced to a hashtag, forever synonymous with police brutality. He unwillingly joined a list of lives cut short in 2020 by racism and police brutality: Breonna Taylor, AhmaudArbery, TonyMcDade, and those we have yet to hear about. These events sparked international outrage and massive protests nationwide and presented national medical societies with an opportunity to speak up and offer moral clarity. As Black physicians, we wanted to find solace knowing that our peers and the institutions we look up to could see us, hear us, and offer solidarity during a moment of pain. The first to respond was the National Medical Association (NMA). The NMA was founded in 1895 when AfricanAmerican physicians were not permitted to join other medical societies. Its foundational principles include promoting the collective interests of Black providers and patients. On May 27th, they released a statement responding to the killing of George Floyd, and called out the institutional racism that allowed it to happen. The NMA set an example for others to follow, speaking directly to the events that sparked national outrage and offering solutions to the underlying problems of police brutality and institutional racism. On May 29th, the American Medical Association (AMA), an organization that has come to terms with its own issues of racism, released a statement that in no uncertain terms laid out the issues surrounding racism, police brutality, and health inequity in the USA. The AMA statement also included specific action items for states, health care institutions, and providers that could potentially address the police brutality that disproportionately affected Black and brown communities. Using the NMA and AMA statements as a framework, we decided to look at the official statements of the academic societies of various medical specialties. Racism permeates every moment of the medical experience for patients and providers: the absence of examples of dermatologic disorders on dark-skinned patients in textbooks, belief that Black patients have a higher tolerance for pain, and a decreased likelihood that a Black patient will be offered a recommended treatment. Ultimately it is racism’s persistence that contributes to the long-standing gap in age-specific Black mortality. 7 As a result, we felt it was important to see how a wide variety of societies and associations (including medical schools and graduate medical education) speak up, and speak explicitly, about what happened to George Floyd and what affects our Black patients on a daily basis. Table 1 8–21 lists a selection of medical societies along with the characteristics of their response, including date released, word count, mention of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and use of specific terms including “police brutality,” “racial injustice,” and “white supremacy.” This selection of societies is not meant to be exhaustive, but instead offer a broad overview of how several major societies did or did not respond to national events. We made an effort to include societies whose scope of practice may include issues related to health disparities. Only statements made on or before June 3, 2020, were included, further limiting the scope of this overview. These terms were selected because they speak to the moment and have become part of the national dialogue. While these terms are not typically discussed by medical societies, they are overarching themes that we associate with racial disparities in medicine. More specifically, though the term “white supremacy” may be provocative to some, it has frequently been used to describe structural racism, and has become more prevalent in the mainstream consciousness over the last several years. As the table shows, we found that a majority of the societies failed to mention the inciting event or address police brutality. While just over half mentioned structural racism, only one society mentioned white supremacy, the literal “structure” in structural racism. A majority did not provide recommendations or action items tailored to these times. In each case, we believe the society’s statement conveys their priorities, sense of urgency, and comfort level in discussing difficult topics. We are disappointed that for some, a milquetoast statement simply opposing racism or suggesting “we need to do more”was enough. We are disappointed that a week could go by and a society could speak to the moment without saying George Floyd or Breonna Taylor’s name. While the timeliness of statements is important, we believe that specificity and word choice are critical. If a medical Received July 14, 2020 Accepted December 10, 2020