Dr. Uché Blackstock

Dr. Uché Blackstock is an emergency physician with over 17 years of experience and a second-generation Harvard graduate. She is the founder of Advancing Health Equity, an organization dedicated to dismantling racism in healthcare. She is also an MSNBC medical contributor and author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine.

Dr. Blackstock is a respected thought leader on bias and racism in healthcare. Described by Forbes as, “a growing voice that is bringing to light and offering solutions to unconscious bias and structural racism among healthcare organizations,” she speaks to organizations across all sectors about the intersection of medicine, health equity, and systemic racism.

In her memoir, Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine, Dr. Blackstock uses a personal lens to tell a broader story about race in America, raising a call to action for health equity. The book is her odyssey from child to medical student to practicing physician—to finally seizing her own power as a health equity advocate against the backdrop of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement.

In the 1980s, Dr. Blackstock’s mother headed an organization of Black woman physicians who cared for patients and the broader community. Dr. Blackstock and her twin sister followed in their mother’s footsteps and headed to Harvard Medical School, making them the first Black mother-daughter legacies from the school. With only about 6 percent of physicians being Black, and only 3 percent being Black women, the Blackstock sisters were making history.

What Dr. Blackstock did not learn at Harvard was that the lack of diversity among physicians has a direct impact on patient care. Black Americans have far worse health outcomes than any other group in the country. One striking example: Citing a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the New York Times reported that “the richest Black mothers and their babies are twice as likely to die as the richest white mothers and their babies.”

Dr. Blackstock’s writing, including numerous OpEds, has been featured in the Chicago Tribune, Scientific American, The Washington Post and STAT News for the Boston Globe. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she appeared regularly on radio and cable news programming to amplify the message around racial health inequities, including with CNN, NPR Morning Edition, The Brian Lehrer Show, Dr. Oz, The New York Times, and has been featured recently on PBS NewsHour and in Essence, as well as on panels at Afropunk and Essence Fest.

Dr. Blackstock is a former associate professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine and the former faculty director for recruitment, retention, and inclusion in the Office of Diversity Affairs at NYU School of Medicine. She received both her undergraduate and medical degrees from Harvard University, making her and her twin sister, Oni, the first Black mother-daughter legacies from Harvard Medical School.

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