UC Irvine Ob/Gyn Residency Program Statement on Police Brutality and Commitment to Anti-Racism

We, the undersigned resident physicians and leadership at the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology at UC Irvine, formally condemn the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and countless others at the hands of police brutality and vigilantism. Their names lengthen an already unbearably long list of Black American lives lost to white supremacy and racism and the individuals who perpetuate them.

To our Black colleagues, we see you and we support you. We are committed to making UCI a safe place to work regardless of the color of your skin or how you identify. We are committed to challenging norms that marginalize or prevent Black physicians from advancing wholly in their careers.

To our Black medical students, we see you and we support you. We commit to making UCI a place where you can learn and thrive. We acknowledge this requires constant evaluation and correction of our own unconscious and conscious biases, and speaking out when we see bias perpetuated against you. We pledge to bring accountability to all levels of academia and the healthcare system.

To our Black patients, we see you and we support you. We commit to making UCI a place where you will receive unbiased care centered on excellence. We are cognizant of the impact that a history of racism and violence has had on your and your children’s health today. We are committed to adopting practices that improve outcomes and eliminate healthcare disparities. We recognize discrimination as a risk factor for poor outcomes, and will treat it as the danger to your health that it is.

To our Black communities in California and around the country, we see you and we support you. We commit to furthering our specialty’s tradition of advocacy to include intentional anti-racism and anti-violence. We respect the work you are doing and commit ourselves as partners in your struggle for justice.

Our thoughts are with the families of those we have lost, including those whose names were not elevated to a national discourse. We make these commitments in their honor. We challenge our colleagues in Obstetrics and Gynecology, and all medical professionals, to commit to anti-racist and anti-violence work. We offer the following resources as a starting point:

Books (please consider supporting local bookshops, particularly black-owned ones; some can be found on bookshop.org, and locally in California at esowonbookstore.com or ashaybythebay.com):

• So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo
• White Rage, Carol Anderson
• How To Be an Antiracist, Ibram Kendi
• Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, Brittney Cooper
• Killing The Black Body, Dorothy Roberts
• Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization, Khiara Bridges
• Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, Harriet A. Washington
• Stamped From the Beginning, Ibram Kendi
• The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander
• Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor’s Reflections on Race and Medicine, Damon Tweedy, MD
• “Toward The Abolition of Biological Race in Medicine and Public Health: Transforming Clinical Education, Research, and Practice”
• White Fragility, Robin DeAngelo
• Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates

Films & TV Series (many made available for free; adapted from antiracism google doc created by Sarah Sophie Flicker and Alyssa Klein)

• 13th (Ava DuVernay) — Netflix
• American Son (Kenny Leon) — Netflix
• Black Power Mixtape: 1967–1975 — Prime
• Blindspotting (Carlos López Estrada) — HBO
• Clemency (Chinonye Chukwu) — Available to rent
• Fruitvale Station (Ryan Coogler) — Tubi
• I Am Not Your Negro (James Baldwin doc) — Prime
• If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins) — Hulu
• Just Mercy (Destin Daniel Cretton) — Prime
• King In The Wilderness — HBO
• See You Yesterday (Stefon Bristol) — Netflix
• Selma (Ava DuVernay) — Available to rent
• The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution — Available to rent
• The Hate U Give (George Tillman Jr.) — Hulu
• Dear White People (Justin Simien) — Netflix
• When They See Us (Ava DuVernay) — Netflix

UC Irvine Ob/Gyn Residents:

Rachel Bervell, MD — PGY-1
Bradley Bosse, MD — PGY-4
Alyssa Bujnak, MD — PGY-2
Lindsay Burton, MD/MPH — PGY-1
Melissa Chambers, MD — Incoming PGY-1
Emily Du, MD — PGY1
Nisha Garg, MD — PGY-4
Danielle Greenberg, MD — Incoming PGY-1
Helena Y. Hong, MD — Incoming PGY-1
Marie-Claire Leaf, MD — PGY-2
Marisa Chi Liu, MD, MPH — PGY-4
Carly Crowder, MD — PGY-3
Melissa Lopez, MD — PGY-1
Ariana L. Melendez, MD — PGY-2
Cariza G. Mercurio, MD — PGY-4
Marielle E. Meurice, MD — PGY-3
Jamie Miller, MD — PGY-2
Rachel A. Newman, MD/MBA — PGY-4
Devesh Naidoo, MD — PGY-1
Toni Okuyemi, MD — Incoming PGY-1
Ann Nguyen Pham, MD — Incoming PGY-1
Priya Patel, MD — PGY-1
Patrick Peñalosa, MD — Incoming PGY-1
Melissa Perez, MD/MPH — PGY-4
Joris Ramstein, MD/MS — Incoming PGY-1
Griselda A. Reyes, MD — PGY-2
Bianca Marcella Rivas, MD/MBA — PGY-3
Luke Robert Schmidt, MD — PGY-2
Dana Senderoff, MD — PGY-3
Alice Sherman-Brown, MD — PGY-2
Joyce Sutedja, MD — PGY-3
Virginia Tancioco, MD/MBA — PGY-4
Paul Wadensweiler, MD/MSc — PGY-3
Lauren Witchey, MD — PGY-1
Blake Zwerling, MD/MSc — PGY-3

With the full support of the UC Irvine Ob/Gyn residency leadership:

Laura Fitzmaurice, MD — Residency Program Director
Jennifer Jolley, MD — Associate Program Director
Reggie Melendez — Residency Program Coordinator

Gratefully adapted from Statement on Police Brutality and Commitment to Anti-Racism, Celeste Green, MD and Rodrigo Muñoz, MD, with permission from the UNC Ob/Gyn Residency Program.