If you aren’t a black person, imagine that you are. It is impossible to capture the full weight of how this would feel, how it would have shaped who you are, with your imagination alone, but it takes no imagination at all to see that racism, discrimination, unfair treatment is literally strangling the life out of our black sisters and brothers today.

As if the wildly disproportionate effects of COVID-19 on minority people weren’t enough to bear, we now see, on national prime time television, another public murder of an unarmed, shackled black man by an officer of the law. 

This is intolerable. I am so ashamed to be a white American man right now, as the accumulated evidence of unequal treatment crushes out any vestiges of this as a land of equal opportunity. It has never been so, and it is becoming less so by the day.

People, this has to stop. I am calling on all of us to redouble our efforts to find every evidence we can of inequity, exclusion, unfair treatment, discrimination, and racism, and, in whatever way best befits our respective stations, to call it out, to root it out. To speak out, to write, to march, to advocate, to legislate, to actively block these deadly acts and poisonous attitudes. To stand with our brothers and sisters who are suffering this inhuman treatment by other human beings.

If you need suggestions about how you can help, here’s a link that has several good ideas.

Frank Verloin deGruy III, MD, MSFM
Woodward-Chisholm Professor and Chair
Department of Family Medicine
University of Colorado School of Medicine