Reparative Justice Commitment

The United States built its medical establishment on the bodies of Black people without their consent. That is not metaphor. It is the structural foundation of the profession we are gathered to teach.

On a slave farm in Alabama in 1844, James Marion Sims founded a small hospital where experimental procedures and established his legacy as the "Father of Gynecology." The history at issue was the torture and experimentation on enslaved Black women, including Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy, whose forced contributions to the fields of obstetrics and gynecology were discarded and erased while Sims's contributions were glorified. J. Marion Sims operated on enslaved women with neither their consent nor anesthesia, despite giving anesthesia to white women after having perfected this procedure. During and after enslavement, physicians often denied Black people basic dignity and personhood through mistreatment that reflected the prevailing and dehumanizing myth that Black people were less sensitive to pain than white people. That myth is not dead. It is active in emergency rooms, labor and delivery wards, and simulation labs right now. Every person in this room who works in healthcare is inheriting that legacy, and we are accountable to it.

We acknowledge the organized, state-sanctioned architecture of racial harm that has shaped Black life in America: chattel slavery, medical experimentation without consent, the convict leasing system as re-enslaved labor, the GI Bill structured to exclude Black veterans, the federal policy of redlining that locked Black families out of intergenerational wealth. Redlining has had a lasting impact on Colorado Springs neighborhoods and on the wealth of Black families. Today, historically redlined neighborhoods in this city continue to do worse economically and are currently more at risk for housing instability and homelessness than predominantly white neighborhoods that were rated "better" in the 1930s.

We name the specific history of this city. Black residents of Colorado Springs have always lived with subservient laws, rules, and attitudes, discrimination, and institutionalized racism. Throughout this city's history, this has resulted in segregation, lynching, redlining, the robbing of pensions, inheritances, and property, health disparities, police violence, and mass incarceration. On August 3, 2019, De'Von Bailey, a 19-year-old Black young man, was shot to death by Colorado Springs Police officers as he ran away. Bailey's death sparked an outcry in this city that gained national attention. These racist structures continue to contribute to disproportionate outcomes for Black residents of Colorado Springs. Racism is not a thing of the past.

We acknowledge that healthcare education is not neutral ground. The simulation technologies, curricula, and clinical standards we teach carry the embedded assumptions of a system built by and for white bodies, white pain thresholds, and white patients as the default human. That is not an abstraction. It is a bias currently operating inside every training scenario that does not name it.

Reparative justice, as named by scholars and organizers within Black communities, demands truth, structural accountability, and material repair. It is not a feeling. It is a framework for action.

Therefore, as an organization, we make the following material commitments. We commit to auditing every simulation scenario and curriculum in active use for anti-Black medical bias, including pain assessment tools, default patient presentations, and clinical language that encodes racial hierarchy. We commit to recruiting Black faculty at full pay equity with their white peers, with no discount applied to what the market has historically offered Black professionals, because that market rate is the harm. We commit to partnering with Black-led community health organizations in Colorado Springs with funded, sustained relationships, not advisory optics. We commit to incorporating the named histories of Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy into our foundational training, so that every student who moves through this program knows whose bodies built the tools they are learning to use. We commit to transparently reporting our progress on these commitments annually, to the communities most harmed, not to ourselves.

Recognition is not repair. This statement is the beginning of what repair requires, not the end of it.