Not Built For Us

Summer is the best season in Rhode Island. People are outside all the time and cooling off under the shade of big, lush trees. What happens when you don’t have shade to cool off in? Some neighborhoods have little to no shade, and usually have higher concentrations of Black folx. Why do urban heat maps and redlining maps align? How can we consider shade a resource like food & housing? How do COVID & the climate crisis widen these inequities?

Medicine is all about lighting-speed pattern recognition. Parsing out what's important in a patient encounter, piecing together the puzzle of symptoms, labs, and imaging - these techniques medical school equips us with can often save lives. What happens when we teach medical professionals to make the same snap judgments about race?