Author Archives: Yesmar Oyarzun

Yesmar is a graduate student at Rice University in the department of anthropology specializing in skin, race, and medical education. Her research follows dermatology trainees as they learn how to detect disease in the diverse city of Washington, DC.
Album cover art from Janelle Monáe's hit track Pynk. The image shows Janelle Monáe, a black woman, wearing a pink outfit standing in a desert beneath a blue sky.

When You Can’t Look Away: Seeing and Difference in American Medicine

When I interviewed her, Juliet was a third-year medical student and a dedicated member of her medical school’s interest groups on social justice. I interviewed her because her name came up in conversations with other medical students at her university, participating in anti-racist work in medicine. She had helped tally the results for her school’s racial justice report card the year I visited, and she cared deeply about issues of racial justice in medicine. She demonstrated in-depth knowledge and interest in our interviews as she discussed just how people of color were disadvantaged in medicine. (read more...)