'Are you actually an M.D.?': A black doctor is questioned as she intervenes on a Delta flight

[left-of-center2012]

Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford was on a Delta flight from Indianapolis to Boston on Tuesday when she noticed the woman next to her showing signs of distress. So Stanford did what she was trained to do in more than a decade of experience as a doctor — she began to assist her. But Stanford, who is black, said she had just started to help the passenger when a flight attendant approached and asked if she was a doctor. Stanford said yes and, without being asked, she took out her medical license, which says she is a physician registered in Massachusetts and has the letters “M.D.” after her name.

The flight attendant glanced at it and walked away, she said. As Stanford continued to try to calm the passenger, another flight attendant approached and asked to see the license. She, too, looked at it and walked away. Then the two flight attendants returned together and began another series of questions.

“Are you a head doctor?” one of them asked. When Stanford said she did not understand the question, the flight attendant asked, “Are you actually an M. D.?” Then the second flight attendant spoke: “Is this your license?” When the doctor asked what she meant, the flight attendant repeated the question. “Why would I carry someone else’s medical license?” Stanford said she replied.

As they were descending, she said, one attendant told her they would not need to check her license anymore because “it seems like you were able to handle everything.” She interpreted the encounter as biased because of the persistent questioning about whether she was a physician even after she had provided proof. “It never stopped,” she said. “I just couldn’t figure out why we were having this discussion.”

Delta apologized to Stanford on Wednesday and said it was investigating, according to the e-mail it sent her.

http://www.startribune.com/are-you-actually-an-m-d-a-black-doctor-is-questioned-as-she-intervenes-on-a-delta-flight/499405701/

[theaocp]

1. What. the. everloving. FUCK.

is wrong with these sub-human mongrels? GET THE FUCK OUT OF YOUR CLOISTERED GODDAMNED BUBBLE, YOU IDIOTS! KEY-RIST!

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

2. Practicing medicine while black?

SMH

[tblue37]

21. I'm surprised they didn't call the cops on her & earn the nickname Airplane Annie. nt

[ret5hd]

3. Hey, I always carry an architects license AND a marine biologist license...

but I'm a fictional character!

[DFW]

4. Why the hell does this always happen on American carriers?

Here in Europe, they're grateful to have a doctor at all, and they sure as hell don't give him/her a hard time about credentials when they're buys saving someone's life.

The next black doctor this happens to should just say, "look, I showed you my creds. Do you want me to try to save this patient, or should I just have the police arrest you for manslaughter when we land?"

[IADEMO2004]

5. A real MD black lady surgeon saved my mom's life after MD white man surgeon failed twice.

Thank You

[mn9driver]

6. This was a Republic airlines crew flying airlink for Delta.

Delta changed their policy and training for cabin crews a couple years ago after a similar incident. Delta cabin crews will not ask for a medical license when someone is rendering aid in flight.

Apparently the policy change didn’t get passed on to their airlink partners.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

20. Was it policy at one point to ask to see a medical license?

[mn9driver]

22. In the past, depending on the circumstances.

Currently most, if not all, US airlines are using ground based emergency medical support. These are ER doctors who specialize in aviation medical issues and deal with them every day. Improved communication technology allows them to diagnose and direct treatment from the ground.

[MuseRider]

7. Didn't this or something very similar

happen before? Maybe it was a black male but I seem to recall it was a woman. Old brain. Does not matter, this is just wrong all around.

[left-of-center2012]

8. Yes

Earlier I found a DU post of a similar case from 2014.
I don't see it now.

I'm sure there are others more recent.
Sadly, it doesn't seem rare.

[uponit7771]

9. Of course .... Delta, they seemed more interested in her credentials than the passenger

[NCjack]

10. Actually, I think that is an important question to ask of anyone

offering medical assistance. There are a lot of crazies will to give "assistance".

[SaschaHM]

12. She showed them her medical license prior to offering help and being asked the question.

"Are you actually an M.D.?" was asked after she showed them credentials proving so.

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

19. Feel free to provide some examples. nt

[gulliver]

11. We'd need to know how often it happens to other demographics to draw any conclusions.

No one should mind the flight attendants double- and triple-checking. The doctor shouldn't have minded either. It shouldn't be in the news. I don't think of flight attendants as being prone to racism, sexism, or ageism. I just think they want to keep their jobs by not letting just anyone work on one of their passengers.

The attendants are in charge on the plane. If the patient had told the attendants she was having trouble, then the attendants could have asked whether there were a doctor aboard the plane. If the doctor above then volunteered, I'm sure the result would have been completely different.

This kind of "raking the attendants over the coals" for racism is something that should never happen unless it is crystal clear a wrong was done. As it sits, the doctor could easily be in the wrong, because she could cost the flight attendants their jobs or cause them to suffer in their careers for what could have been understandable, reasonable behavior on their parts.

[SaschaHM]

13. Understandable, reasonable behavior would be asking to see her credentials again.

That's not what they did. They posed a series of questions that regardless of the answer (because people can lie) wouldn't ascertain as to whether the woman really was a doctor. They didn't "do their job", they pestered a Doctor and potentially put a patient at risk by delaying treatment. If they were concerned about whether or not her License was fake, they would have looked over it again and cross checked it with an employee directory at whatever hospital she worked at. They didn't ask her any of that.

Second of all, Black people deal with racism from people in the service industry all the time. It's is never about the job. It is about the person and their willingness to leverage what little power they have to make things harder on black people.

[left-of-center2012]

18. I totally agree with you.

[BlueWI]

16. So the doctor's at fault for reporting this incident??

None of us know more than what we read. But in your view, the doctor, a person of color who actually experienced this incident, "could easily be in the wrong"? Even though she assisted the patient, dealt with the perceived microaggresion of repeated calls for credentials, and reported her experience? Silence would be better, in your view? And what's the magic elixir that makes flight attendants less racist than anyone else?

A lot of rationalizing here to justify mistrust of the doctor's experience. Even Delta apologized.

[gulliver]

17. Gotta forgive trespasses ya know.

No one knows what the flight attendants were thinking. I'm not into the term microaggression. It looks to me like a way to justify being intolerant of others at a finer level of granularity than, say, a slap in the face. If someone commits what you think is a microagression, you should micro turn the other cheek.

[BlueWI]

23. Sure, no one knows what anyone was thinking.

However, if the reporting is correct, we know what the actions were, and racism isn't just a case of consciously saying, "I'm going to discriminate against this black MD by doubting her qualifications and subjecting her to greater scrutiny than I would a white MD, even when an emergency is occurring." Racism is frequently unconscious, reinforced by social scripts that are learned deeply over time.

Also, what's at stake here is whether to believe or disbelieve the person who reported racism. Microaggression is a simple term to denote racial slights that are commonly experienced by persons of color, but are commonly disbelieved by others, especially white people, who tend to ask for smoking gun proof of racism before they admit that it exists or that it occurred in a particular incident.

So, it's certainly your choice whether to believe in the term "microaggression" or not. However, it's a sign of the times that, paradoxically, racism persists in all objective measures one can think of - income, wealth, employment, home loans and interest rates, incarceration, health outcomes for those who are insured, life earnings for those with a college degree, etc., while the preponderance of us still deny that they perpetrate or excuse racism. This includes the pro-Trump crowd, where at least on DU, we agree that the other folks are racist, but not us. In sum, the pattern seems to be that no one is racist unless they "slap you in the face," but racism endures in all sorts of measurable ways, and when persons of color report racism, they are disbelieved, even on DU where it is common to claim not to be racist, or to support the Congressional Black Caucus, or to support Black Lives Matters, or to feel empathy for persons of color who experience racism. I think that frequently, these kinds of claims are a mile wide and an inch deep.

At the end of the day, think what you want, but your reaction to the incident is on the wrong side of history.

[Gidney N Cloyd]

14. With all the checking in and profiling it takes to get on a plane shouldn't they know who's an MD?

[rickford66]

15. If the passenger's episode was life threatening, could the doctor be in trouble for not assisting ?