Photo Courtesy of Harvard University
Dr. Uché Blackstock and Dr. Oni Blackstock are walking in their mother’s footsteps– another Black woman doctor.
Dr. Oni Blackstock and Dr. Uché Blackstock are twin sisters, raised by an African-American single mother in New York City. While raising seven children, their mother, Dale Blackstock, graduated from Harvard Medical School. Their mother passed when the twins were 19, but they followed in her footsteps and attended Harvard, graduating in 2004 and 2005.
Dr. Oni is a primary care and HIV physician who is the founder and executive director of Health Justice, a consulting firm created to reduce health inequities.
She is an assistant commissioner with the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, where she oversees the city’s HIV intervention work, focusing primarily on women of color.
Dr. Uché is a board-certified emergency medicine physician at New York University who founded Advancing Health Equity, consulting with organizations to identify and eradicate unconscious bias and racism.
“Our experiences definitely complement each other,” Uché told Mother Jones in an interview, “I’m on the ground, whereas my sister is at the policy-making table.”
Like their mother, the doctors brought their skills and training back to the community.
“Our mother also drew upon and gave support to other women in the field,” adds Oni. “She was president of an organization of black female doctors in Brooklyn. That was normal to us. We did, however, realize the sorts of obstacles she had to overcome to get to where she was.”
Both sisters are active in New York City’s fight against the coronavirus pandemic through education and vaccine access to the most threatened populations in the city.
Black women doctors are a rarity. Only two percent of physicians in the US are Black women.