Steven McDonald ’04 -On the Power of Finding Your Voice

After graduating from Hopkins, McDonald earned his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and his medical degree from Columbia University. He said his experience working as a resident at both Bellevue Hospital and Columbia University Medical Center in New York helped him gain “racial and class consciousness,” as he had a front-row seat to the inherent biases and inequality in medicine as well as the limitations people of color face in getting sufficient medical care. 

“It was going in between emergency rooms when I began to note some key differences and key problems with our public health system as it exists today,” said McDonald. “So at the same time I was learning medicine, I was also learning and absorbing some implicit lessons.” 

Often the only male physician of color attending, McDonald began to confront his own racial identity. In 2016, after reading a piece in The New York Times on trends that showed how men of color are more likely to fall in social class, McDonald wrote an op-ed to share his perspectives. Though the piece was ultimately rejected— a moment McDonald saw as a failure at the time— he remained undeterred and continued to write with the intention of shining a spotlight on the issues he was experiencing firsthand.

In June 2020, after four years’ worth of rejections, McDonald’s voice was finally amplified. With COVID-19 in its first wave, and as protests spread across the country in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, McDonald published an op-ed in The New York Times. In the piece, he shared his viewpoint on how the demonstrations were necessary to expose racial disparities not only in law enforcement or the justice system but in healthcare as well. He said the idea for the piece was sparked by a reporter asking him how he specifically felt about the demonstrations as a physician of color.

“To ask, ‘What do you think as a Black doctor about COVID-19 and the protests?’ is to ask me to choose my skin color or my health,” he wrote. A year later, VICE.com included McDonald in their piece that reflected on progress and ongoing challenges since the initial protests. 

McDonald has since continued to be an advocate for change. In April 2022, he joined a panel on PBS for a program called Eye of the Storm: A Town Hall with Healthcare Workers About Mental Health, which featured a deep discussion on how healthcare professionals combatted fatigue, pandemic disinformation, racial injustice, and other moral concerns during COVID-19.