#WhataDoctorLooksLike.

On October 30, 2018, a female passenger on a Delta Air Lines flight from Indianapolis to Boston began to have a mid-air panic attack. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, and who was seated next to the shaking woman, did what any doctor would do—she began to render the necessary medical assistance to calm the passenger.

But the medical situation quickly escalated into an allegation of racial profiling after two flight attendants repeatedly questioned Stanford’s medical credentials and expertise. As she was stabilizing the passenger, Stanford, who is African American, voluntarily presented her medical license when one attendant asked if she was a doctor. A second attendant then approached her to ask the same question. Both attendants then walked to the back of the plane. After a few moments, both flight attendants then approached Stanford once more. The first attendant inquired whether she was a “head doctor,” and the second attendant asked if the license she had just presented actually belonged to her.

“Why would I carry someone else’s medical license?” Stanford says she replied in bewilderment.

That evening, she tweeted about the experience in two posts that went viral, garnering news coverage from major media outlets in the US and in more than 100 countries. The tweets reignited the hashtag #WhataDoctorLooksLike—which first trended on Twitter after a 2016 incident on a Delta Air Lines flight, where flight attendants dismissed the medical services of African American physician Tamika Cross during an in-flight emergency, claiming they were seeking assistance from “an actual doctor.”

On Wednesday, February 5, Stanford will visit the School of Public Health as the featured speaker for the Diversity & Inclusion Seminar “Is There a Doctor on Board? Racial Profiling and Health” during which she will discuss the impact that racial profiling, discrimination, and biases can have on the physical and mental health of people of color.

“Most people don’t look at me and think I’m a doctor,” says Stanford, who is also an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, associate at MGH’s Disparities Solution Center, and guest speaker at 100-150 events per year on obesity, as well as diversity and equity in health and medicine. Ironically, she had interviewed Cross during a Massachusetts Medical Society conference on bias in medicine just 10 days prior to her flight from Indianapolis.

“Tamika had been working with Delta to address situations involving bias because she didn’t want anyone else to experience what she had experienced,” says Stanford. “Two years later, [my experience] showed that no progress had been made.”

Ahead of the seminar, Stanford spoke about discrimination she endured in medical school, the overlap of weight and racial bias, and the importance of exposing people to racial bias training before they are even born.

What was the response like from the public after your tweets went viral?

It was interesting to hear the experiences of so many people of color—I had a lot of doctors tell me that they started carrying their medical licenses, too. A lot of white male doctors came up to me to say, ‘I’m sorry this has happened to you—I’ve been flying for years and have responded to in-flight emergencies, and no one has ever asked for my medical license.’

I was born and raised in Atlanta, Ga., where Delta is based, and in my zip code, there are more black doctors per capita than any other place in the United States. You’d think that they would be a bit more sensitive to issues of race and discrimination, but leadership doesn’t reflect that within the airline.

In previous interviews, you’ve said that the flight incident did not make you angry, because if it did, you would be angry every day. Have you experienced discrimination at other points in your career?

What I experienced on the Delta flight pales in comparison to what I experienced at the Medical College of Georgia, where I received my medical degree. Here is one example: In 2003, I became the first black class president in the school’s history, after running against three white male opponents. I was approached by the university historian, who took me on a tour of the school’s archives. As we were looking at pictures of the early classes of the college, which was founded in 1828, we saw a black man in each of the pictures. The historian said his name was Grandison Harris, a slave who was owned by the anatomy and physiology professors at the college, and whose role was to rob black grave sites so that the professors would have bodies by which to learn anatomy. I asked her if the school had ever acknowledged his contribution to the institution, and she said no.

As the president of my class, I thought it was my duty to acknowledge this gentleman and his contributions during the school’s cadaver memorial ceremony, but I faced significant disdain from the other class officers. People threw things at me in class every single day. They published an anonymous newsletter in which they talked about my black features, and sent it to the entire university.

So when we compare someone on Delta not believing I’m a doctor to my classmates, who are now physicians, you wonder which situation hurts more? It’s the one where people knew who I was and what my role was, and still treated me that way, in a setting that is supposed to be a safe haven for me to be educated, as opposed to a place with people tearing me down. That was their goal, but it obviously didn’t work out.

Did your medical school provide training to identify racial bias?

No—a strong no. Most schools don’t, and if they do, it’s cursory. The constant mantra that you hear—that whites are better off, with regards to their health, than blacks, Latinos, and other groups—indirectly says that a person of Caucasian descent has even more of a reason to feel that they are superior to their minority colleagues. We don’t delve into that aspect at all.

Typically, the people who learn a lot about race bias are the people who experience race bias—which are the people who don’t need to learn it as much. But race bias is not well taught or well addressed throughout the continuum of education. The likelihood of having the most impact is in preschool, before children have a chance to develop significant biases towards and/or against certain groups. I often talk about weight bias, which kids start to show signs of at 22 months of age. We have to start this training very early, even while the mother is still bearing the child.

How do weight bias and race bias overlap?

If a person has excess weight, people judge them for what they are doing or not doing to achieve or maintain a healthy weight. If someone happens to be 300 pounds, the presumption for many doctors is that they must be eating horribly and not exercising, without ever doing a deeper dive to consider genetic factors. The heritability of obesity is about 70 to 80 percent, so the likelihood that this person was going to have obesity is pretty high, no matter how well a parent did in terms of feeding them the right foods, breastfeeding, etc.

Unlike other disease processes, we wear our weight, and with that comes the ability to evaluate and/or criticize based upon the outwardly show that obesity is. When we overlay weight and race bias, you can imagine that there are millions of socio-stereotypes associated with a person who happens to be black and who has excess weight, that would not be commonplace for a white individual who struggles with their weight. Weight bias just surpassed race bias as the most common form of bias in the US. Now, 80 percent of African American women in the United States have overweight and obesity—so you can imagine how they are perceived, and the disadvantages they face due, to their excess weight and their race.

What have you taken away from your personal and professional experiences with discrimination?

As a Christian, I believe that God can’t give you what you can’t handle; if I’m given the platform through which to express what I feel and experience, then I should use it. I feel like I was given this voice, and so that means that I’m supposed to be doing this work, looking at issues of race and its impact on health and how it impacts delivery of care to patients of color and how it impacts healthcare providers of color who endeavor to treat all despite judgements about their race or ethnic background.

—Jillian McKoy