White Doctor Sues Black Medical Directory Because White People Can’t Stop Minding Black People’s Business

For people who claim to be experiencing unprecedented levels of “Black fatigue,” white people, especially white conservatives, just can’t seem to stay out of Black people’s business, especially when they feel excluded from it.

Take, for example, the lawsuit filed by Do No Harm — which describes itself in the legal filing as a nationwide, grassroots, 501(c)(3) membership organization that consists of more than 50,000 health care professionals, students, patients, and policymakers — on behalf of white dermatologist Travis Morrell, who was excluded from a directory for Black people searching for Black doctors.

The lawsuit was filed against Find A Black Doctor, an online directory founded by a Black woman, Dr. Dina D. Strachan, a graduate of Harvard University and Yale School of Medicine, and a board-certified dermatologist, who probably thought it was harmless to establish a directory that would simply make it easier for Black people to find doctors who look like them, share a cultural likeness with them, and are less likely to contribute to the well-documented discrepancies in sufficient medical care that Black people, especially Black women, receive from non-Black doctors.

From AFROTECH:

According to its website, its directory features U.S.-based Black physicians and dentists in active clinical practice. It is driven by a mission to provide patients in the Black community with access, education, and resources to improve health outcomes.

According to a statement on Find A Black Doctor’s website, “Having access to Black doctors has been shown to improve health outcomes — particularly for Black men.” The American Medical Association reports that African Americans make up approximately 13% of the U.S. population, but are only 5% of practicing physicians. “This underrepresentation adds a challenge to potential patients seeking a physician of this kind. Just like women have been shown to prefer access to female physicians, some African American patients prefer to have a Black doctor,” reads the statement on Find A Black Doctor’s website.

Again, Strachan likely didn’t see the harm in creating such a resource for the Black community. After all, we’re not talking about qualified white physicians being denied employment opportunities in favor of lesser qualified Black doctors, which is what white people are convinced diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives do, which they don’t. We’re talking about a directory for potential patients looking for a Black doctor, meaning they wouldn’t choose Morrell even if he were included.

Oh, but we can never underestimate the power of white fragility, and how it prompts white people to find victimhood in things that actually have no perceivable effect on their lives whatsoever. The same way they get their unwashed, doo-doo-stained Klan-derwear all in a bunch over the existence of Black History Month, the Black National Anthem, and HBCUs — all things they could simply ignore if they’re so bothered by them — they just can’t stand the idea of Black people doing for Black people in ways that don’t allow them to include or center themselves for no practical reason.

So, Do No Harm — which, according to its website, is dedicated to “keeping identity politics out of medical education, research, and clinical practice” — filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that Strachan failed to comply with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which prohibits racial discrimination in contracting. 

“Racial discrimination in medicine is unlawful and undermines trust between patients and providers,” Kurt Miceli, MD, chief medical officer at Do No Harm, wrote in a press release. “By excluding qualified doctors based solely on their skin color, Find A Black Doctor indefensibly robs some physicians of valuable advertising exposure and deprives patients of the opportunity to discover capable providers without regard to race. The idea that patients have better outcomes when treated by doctors of the same race — known as racial concordance — is a pernicious and debunked myth that only sows distrust in the doctor-patient relationship. Do No Harm remains committed to rooting out all identity-based political programs in medicine.”

Even if it were true that the long, well-established history of anti-Black medical racism in the U.S. were a “debunked myth,” which it is not, it’s obviously a circular, illogical argument to claim white doctors are being denied “valuable advertising exposure” because they’re not being included in a directory that people would only use if they specifically wanted to see a Black doctor. This isn’t discrimination; this is an apple farmer filing a lawsuit because his product isn’t being displayed in a grocery store section designated for oranges.

Let’s be real about what happened here: Morrell saw the word “Black” included in the title of a directory and decided to apply for inclusion in that directory as a white doctor, knowing he would be rejected, giving himself and Do No Harm all the opportunity they needed to do harm to Black people who are looking for medical care.

Mind you, this is only the latest entry in the trend of white people either minding Black people’s business while Black people are trying to aid their own communities, or suing to end programs that help Black people navigate institutional racism because they don’t get to benefit from it.

Earlier this month, a white woman filed a federal class action lawsuit because she was denied acceptance into a Black infant health program in Pasadena, California, not because she couldn’t have found a health program that wasn’t designed to include all races, as the overwhelming majority of them are, but because she couldn’t get in on one of the few programs that addresses the fact that, unlike white babies, Black babies have a mortality rate of 10.93 deaths per 1,000 live births, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Incidentally, highest medical authority in the country, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., also doesn’t believe these health discrepancies need to be addressed, which is why he cut Black maternal health research from the federal budget, once said that Black children should be “re-parented” because “every Black kid” has been put on ADHD medication, which is statistically untrue, and once claimed Black people don’t need white people’s vaccine schedule because Black people have more enduring immune systems. The Trump administration also cut funding for Black infant health research, before it was sued and ordered to restore it.

Like Morrell and Do No Harm, the Trump administration has dismissed these initiatives as DEI, which is to say it opposes them on behalf of the white and eternally fragile, not because they aren’t necessary.

And it doesn’t stop at medical care. In 2024, reported extensively on the white-tearsy debacle surrounding the Fearless Fund, a venture capital firm owned and operated by Black women, who offered grants reserved for businesses owned by Black women, until it was shut down by a conservative group that sued the organization for not offering grants to white women.

As I wrote previously: “The Fearless Fund is a private entity founded and run by Black women who use private funds to help the underserved Black woman entrepreneurs in our communities. They should be able to do whatever they want with those funds in this so-called free country, but since white people are often hardwired to center themselves in everything, white plaintiffs are suing the firm because it doesn’t offer grants to the most overwhelmingly represented demographic in corporate America.”

White people keep telling us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and help our own communities instead of asking for handouts, but when we do just that, they pretend to feel discriminated against.

It may be a cowardly, passive-aggressive form of white supremacy, but it’s white supremacy all the same.

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