Segregation in the medical school classroom

“Are you a left-sider or a right-sider?” my classmate asked with a puzzled look during an end-of-the-year dinner among first-year medical students. I was confused. He repeated himself then answered. “Do you sit on the left or the right side in class … that’s right; you sit on the right.” He then mentioned that everyone present was a “right-sider.” Nearly everyone was white.

For the past 18 months, we sat in a racially arranged way in class: most white people were concentrated on the front to the middle right of the auditorium, black women sat the furthest back, and everybody else sat on the left side with few exceptions. This arrangement translated to the lunch tables and other social settings. We may, at first, think of this divide as different parties sharing equal responsibility, but we live in a society where minorities still have negative experiences in today’s integrated schools. These experiences are linked to a history of structural racism: negative media portrayal, policies perpetuating segregation and impeding upward mobility for racial and ethnic minorities. They experience isolation in different ways, and one of the common coping mechanisms is in-group separation out of self-preservation.

Beverly Tatum expounds on this in her book Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together at the Cafeteria Table? She describes different groups’ experiences with race and explains the burden on minorities, especially blacks and Latinos. Self-segregation happens out of self-preservation from macro and…