The American healthcare system needs reform; that should be apparent enough. The problem is that many issues within U.S. healthcare are systemic, like when it comes to women’s treatment and, more particularly, the treatment of Black pregnant women.
Black women face such a crisis in the U.S. healthcare system that Kamala Harris addressed their needs directly back in May. To do so, she was accompanied by Dr. Jackie Walters from Married to Medicine.
The two had an important conversation about maternity mortality and the (hopefully) increasing rights of Black mothers. Dr. Jackie encouraged mothers to find a doctor they could trust. Now, some past comments have fans questioning how qualified she was to make that suggestion.
Dr. Jackie calls African American women “dramatic”
On December 19, Twitter user @bakara_j posted an old clip of Dr. Jackie in a YouTube Live with her costar Dr. Heavenly Kimes. In the clip, Dr. Jackie said, “As African American women, we’re a bit more dramatic, and that you go to the doctor and you complain and you complain and you complain and you’re not taken seriously because you cry wolf the entire pregnancy.”
She continued, “As African American women, We wanna also make sure that you’re being serious with your doctor and not playing the games so that could take you off work. Because then we see you 25 times in the pregnancy, it’s hard to believe there’s a true problem when there’s a true problem.”
Twitter users were not shy about voicing their criticisms of Dr. Jackie’s words. As one reply read, “She’s dangerous to [Black women] because we would trust her and she’s just as complicit with the white medical industry.” The Twitter user who posted the clip also noted that Dr. Jackie has “never carried a baby full term and has no reality of the physical strain it takes.”
On @auntibuffie’s page on TikTok (where the clip was sourced), fans were equally as upset. “She basically said we can’t be trusted with knowing our own pain level…” one commenter wrote. Another said, “If our own doctors don’t take us seriously, then who will?”
