The Deep Medicine of Solidarity

Back to School to Learn the Future of Medicine

For the past 10 months at UCSF—where I am a Professor of Medicine and where I have worked as for 22 years developing my career as an expert in addressing racism and health—I have endured harassment, malignment of my character & my clinical excellence, attempts to silence & frame me as a bully for speaking out against Israel’s genocide in Palestine. Racism in medicine kills. And genocide is its ultimate expression.

Genocide harms all of us. It debases humanity. And people in the USA are complicit because these are our tax dollars. If advocating for genocide is a crime by international law, one has to wonder where muzzling opposition to genocide through weaponizing university machinery fits. The effects are the same—the killing continues uncontested.

Creating fear for one’s livelihood and career is a sick way to force a whole community into silence and get them to think the situation in Gaza has nothing to do with them. But it does and speaking up is the most important thing to do right now as a healthcare worker, as the largest cohort of child amputees grows in Gaza and polio which was once eradicated is now epidemic due to the poor water quality created by Israel’s siege.

A public university, UCSF is nonetheless controlled by the Diller Foundation, a major donor whose money was made throwing working class people out of their San Francisco rent controlled apartments as Prometheus Real Estate Group became the largest corporate landlord in the Bay Area. The Dillers donate to far right groups and anti-Muslim organizations. They have supported the Canary Mission which tries to destroy the careers of people like me by working backstage to bend power to their will. It’s disgusting. Our new hospital is going up on Parnassus Avenue in San Francisco is funded by them.

The walls of that hospital will be lined with the cries of the people forcibly evicted to the streets of SF where they suffer horrific violence, degradation, sickness & death. The unhoused people are quickly shuffled out of the hospital beds to make way for the more profitable patients, ones who don’t require as many resources of support. Who can we seek redress from when Governor Newsom of California personally throws away unhoused people’s wheelchairs as he orders violent sweeps of unhoused people living in tents who have no place to go? Legislation to sweep away corporate landlords would be a more effective manner to create accessible housing supply.

Song by musician No$hu Inspired by the Exposure of the Diller Foundation

The walls of the new hospitals will hold the images of children amputees in Gaza & the cries of their parents. The Diller’s pro-Israel stance in the midst of genocide had UCSF forcing us to sit through their endowed racist professors lecturing us about on campus bigotry. These violences are connected. Exposing the relationships of power and how power is used to repress and oppress is critical to shifting the dynamics.

Taking on racism squarely and directly requires courage and clarity, not kid-gloves and sideways speak and being quiet to save your pet project while there’s a racist genocide happening that you are being manipulated not to speak about. As a scholar of colonialism, society and health, my scholarship is the precise target of right wing attempts to erase discourse on racism, history from the oppressed’s perspectives and ethnic studies. As a brown woman who has spent 25 years on stage developing my voice, I’m a target.

But as they seek to make an example of me, I need you to remember that everything I’m experiencing is nothing compared to the 885+ healthcare workers who Israel killed in Gaza. And I speak up for them and for the children and the people in Palestine whose voices are being permanently silenced. Medicine requires diagnostic clarity. And the diagnosis is clear: UCSF is engaged in deeply racist repression of faculty, students and staff for decrying genocide.

Racism isn’t confined to one group. It spills everywhere. Once this issue blows over, the next emerges. Until we gather the courage to speak & act up to stop all of its actions and activities wherever and whenever it shows up, we will struggle to close health disparities for oppressed people. Solidarity is the only power that has the force to topple oppression. Denying people the right to life and then denying others to right to decry the violence is an oppression that must be toppled. Solidarity requires courage, but the best part about it is that you are not in it alone. Solidarity is Deep Medicine. As school resumes and the medical students return, I look forward to continue to teach them the medicine of the future, one that offers diagnostic clarity on systems that create harm and insists on health justice for all—with no exception.