I’m a physician. Silent Sam is bad for our health.
Chancellor Carol Folt and the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees have been tasked to find a plan for the disposition and preservation of the Confederate monument known as Silent Sam by Nov. 15. As a physician and UNC medical school alumnus, I oppose the return of Silent Sam to the UNC campus and call on all my colleagues to join me. UNC-educated physicians have long fought against any form of racial animus or discrimination on the UNC campus.
The medical community is not immune to racism. One of the first UNC black medical students, Dr. James Slade, recalls being told to work on the black patient wards and not to examine white female patients on his obstetrics rotation. Black doctors in this state have been denied hospital privileges and suffered through a long, slow, integration into the medical school. Black patients in this state have fared even worse, treated in separate hospitals and wards, experimented on without consent, and subjected to the absurdities of eugenics.
Even today, institutional racism limits African-Americans’ access of care, excludes them from Medicaid expansion, and denies them equitable treatment. More subtly, racism, often swiftly followed by social rejection and blocked economic opportunities, causes psychosocial stress and limits access to healthy lifestyles, preventive care, and treatment. These untoward health effects can span generations causing behavioral and possibly biological processes.
This is not an opinion; it is a scientific fact. Currently in North Carolina, African Americans have a lower life expectancy, as well as reduced live births and increased infant mortality, than their Caucasian counterparts. Serious diseases like hypertension, diabetes and coronary heart disease are less adequately treated in the African-American community. African-American men, statistically the most likely to suffer from heart disease, more commonly die from it.
The medical community has long understood that racial disparities in health care exist, and at least some of these disparities can be traced to institutional racism.
This brings us back to Silent Sam. The presence of a Confederate statue on UNC’s campus implicitly pays homage to those who promoted slavery, which shamefully minimizes the suffering of black people in this country. Displaying a cultural marker of one of the darkest times of U.S. history without actively condemning the injustice of slavery, let alone celebrating it, is unacceptable.
No argument of nostalgia, cultural preservation, or supposed neutrality outweighs the pain and exclusion that such a statue perpetuates. Those who argue that Silent Sam’s presence on campus is not racism are simply wrong. Racism can occur on multiple levels, explicitly or indirectly. Statues like Silent Sam are cultural communications of racism, conveying a message that African-Americans are not deserving of equal opportunity or protections against unfair treatment.
The first article of the Confederate constitution included this provision: “No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in Negro slaves shall be passed.” In other words, the document foresaw the continuation of slavery forever. We do not wish to undermine the genuine feelings of those who wish for the statue’s return, but those feelings are rooted in a misguided nostalgia for an era only some could ever hope to appreciate, and even then, for all the wrong reasons.
I along with others in the medical community stand strongly with the faculty and students who have petitioned UNC to make the correct decision. Respectfully, we urge the university not to return Silent Sam to his pedestal and question whether he should be placed on any pedestal at all.