Aletha Maybank

Spotlight

Since physician Aletha Maybank assumed the inaugural role of chief health equity officer at the AMA in 2019, she’s been instrumental in the organization’s major reckoning with its own racist history while pushing to advance the causes of racial justice and health equity throughout medicine. To that end, in February 2023, the AMA launched a free virtual event series aimed at exploring the structural causes of current-day health disparities, and in a recent interview with Nature, Maybank touted the expanded health equity content on the AMA’s online education hub. “We need to recognize and disrupt dominant and malignant narratives that are pervasive in health care, which often blame people for their own health conditions and circumstances,” she said. 

STAT’s Deborah Balthazar spoke with Maybank about her health equity work: 

I was reading about the racial reckoning at the AMA, and it looks like it has taken a while from 1989 to now to get to this point. Do you wish that these changes were happening faster?

The AMA still has its challenges on their policies that don’t fully support equity in the mindset of some. And like any institution that has been around for 176 years now, it’s an institution that is created under and with a white supremacist lens, from the sense of — when I say that — the hierarchy of human value based on skin color. But that’s the entirety of medicine. There is no institution in this country that has been predominantly white or historically white that doesn’t suffer from those realities; we see that play out in the social context today. 

I try to really ground myself and ground young people in the sense of what creates hope — that we’re part of a legacy of people who believe and know that they deserve dignity; they are of value. And we all deserve love as well. And that legacy is a beautiful legacy. It’s a painful legacy, and an exhausting legacy. 

What changes are you most proud of during your tenure?

I would say our big document that we put out in 2021, the AMA equity strategic plan, definitely generated much attention [and] really set a clear foundation and grounding for where we needed to go as AMA. And I think it influenced the larger aspect of medicine. I think the other big reward was around our narrative guide, which came out after the strategic plan. And this was really a tremendous tool for physicians to know how to use language and understand how language impacts actions. We know many med schools actually have embraced it, and have adopted it into their curriculums. We know some pharma [companies], it’s become part of their communication guides; federal agencies, as well.

Read the full conversation.