On Aug. 28, a spectator at a volleyball game at Brigham Young University yelled the N-word multiple times at Rachel Richardson, a player from Duke University. There was no intervention by school officials until after the game. And while this may seem like an isolated incident, racist taunts like these are a routine experience for Black Americans, and silence from non-Black bystanders is the harmful norm.
The first time I was called the N-word to my face, it was by a white male patient who was angry because I would not discharge him from the hospital. It happened when I was on rounds as the doctor on call, in front of a crowd of white staff. Some of them were supervisors, who had been vocal seconds before about various hospital protocols to the angry patient, but all of them became silent after the N-word. Suddenly, the authoritative staff members had nothing to say. No one asked me if I was OK. No one told the patient that racism was unacceptable.
And the sad reality is that I hadn’t expected them to. My experience mirrored that of so many of my Black colleagues around the country, who had been targeted by racist threats while their non-Black colleagues said and did nothing.
