In the beginning, when I first entered medical school, I thought the growing knot in my chest was just the stress of the program. The sleepless nights, endless studying, and the constant feeling of needing to prove myself—especially as a Black woman in a sea of faces that didn’t look like mine. But it was more than that. Slowly, that anxiety grew into something deeper, something I hadn’t expected: hypochondria.

Each day I learned about diseases, conditions, and treatments. Every new lecture on high blood pressure or diabetes felt like a diagnosis waiting for me. It wasn't just the pressure of being a med student; it was the way I began to see myself in every statistic. I’d sit in the lecture hall, surrounded by non-Black students and professors, looking at slides showing disproportionate rates of disease in Black communities. It was like a mirror, except I wasn’t the only one reflected. My family, my neighbors, everyone I grew up with—they were all there, in those numbers. And I was learning how bad it really was.

Every clinical rotation seemed to confirm the statistics: My patients were almost always Black. Even as I moved through different specialties and wards, I saw the same thing. No matter where I was—ER, pediatrics, internal medicine—the waiting rooms were filled with Black faces, often lined with weariness and suspicion. The disconnect grew sharper. How is it that I’m surrounded by people who look nothing like my patients, but those patients look like me? The deeper I got into my studies, the clearer the divide became, and it started to feel wrong in a way that gnawed at me.

My hypochondria faded, but it was replaced by something far heavier: anger. Sadness, too, but mostly anger. The more I learned, the more I saw how we got here. The history of medicine is littered with experiments on Black bodies, from Tuskegee to Henrietta Lacks, stories we learned about in passing in our classes, like footnotes. It explained why my patients often eyed me with caution, even though I looked like them. I understood the mistrust; it had been earned through generations of betrayal and neglect. But it hurt. It hurt to know that, for many of them, I was a rare figure—someone they could trust in a system built on their exploitation.

And still, the people making decisions in medicine, the ones shaping policies, researching treatments, prescribing care, deciding who even gets to be a doctor—they didn’t look like us. They didn’t know our stories. And I wondered how many of them cared to learn.

Even now, as a physician, it weighs on me in ways I didn’t expect when I first put on this white coat. Not just the responsibility of caring for my patients but the awareness that I’m part of a broken system. A system that looks at my people through a lens of deficits—"higher risks," "worse outcomes"—but never seems to ask why, never seems to take real ownership of the harm that’s been done. In my time in medicine, I’ve been able to collect Black mentors who understand. It’s the Black Doctor Tax — we all carry it. We are weighted by the emotional trauma of our communities. Seeing the aunties, grandmas, cousins we don’t know who walk through our doors, carrying with them not only a disproportionate share of health problems due to no fault of their own, but also experiences of deep mistreatment and discrimination that have led to where they are — including discrimination by clinicians and within the health system.

In all the important ways, it is an honor to be a Black doctor. I can develop a quick trust with patients who otherwise feel uneasy. With my Black patients, I can often laugh, joke, and chatter in a way that belies a deep-rooted connection and community love. And I gladly go the extra mile for all my patients — but I feel particularly urgent and fulfilled doing so for my Black patients.

But on a systems level, it is exhausting to see and hear from my Black patients the way they have been mistreated — not because of them or because I do not want to hear their stories, but because I am exhausted by the system that treats them this way. And now I am a fully-fledged doctor, the numbers have added up. The disproportionate numbers of Black faces, dead or dying or needlessly disabled, that I have seen throughout my training and work will stay etched in my mind forever.

I’m not just angry for me. I’m angry for every patient who walks into these sterile rooms, wondering if they’ll be heard or dismissed, treated or ignored. And I wonder, every day, how long it will take before they don’t have to wonder at all.