On Sunday, October 9, OB/GYN resident Dr. Tamika Cross, a black woman, was aboard flight DL945 on Delta Airlines traveling from Detroit, Michigan to Minneapolis, Minnesota when suddenly a fellow passenger became unresponsive. Instinctively, Dr. Cross jumps up to lend aid to the man whose wife screamed for help. However, Dr. Cross kept seated when a flight attendant told the cabin to remain calm because he was just having a night terror. A few minutes later, the man becomes unconscious, the flight attendant calls for a physician's help, and just when Dr. Cross raises her hand to offer help, the flight attendant snaps, "oh no sweetie put [your] hand down, we are looking for actual physicians or nurses or some type of medical personnel, we don't have time to talk to you." Each time Dr. Cross tries to explain that she is a doctor, she gets cut off by condescending remarks. A page from the overhead calls for any physician to press their button and as Dr. Cross presses her's, the flight attendant says, "oh wow you're an actual physician?" The flight attendant continues to badger Dr. Cross with questions concerning her credentials such as where she's from, what kind of physician she is, and what she was doing in Detroit. Meanwhile, this is all happening while the patient is unconscious and Dr. Cross being physically blocked from exiting the aisle to assist the man. Dr. Cross answers her questions just when another physician, a "seasoned" white male, appears to offer his help. The flight attendant immediately tells Dr. Cross that her assistance is no longer needed and that the other male physician would handle the situation because he "has his credentials," yet he didn't show any documentation.

Since posting on Facebook, Dr. Cross's account of this incident of discrimination went viral with having over 46,000 shares as of Oct. 15 and sparked the hashtag #WhatADoctorLooksLike on Twitter. Physicians of color, particularly black women, have been tweeting pictures of themselves with the hashtag to increase awareness and let Delta Airlines know that they exist. Dr. Cross's story has also inspired the writing of articles with first person testimonies of black female physicians describing situations in which they have experienced discrimination either from their patients or their colleagues.

One particular piece is written by board-certified dermatological surgeon Dr. Meena Singh in blackdoctor.org. In the article, Dr. Singh writes that she did not grow up with any pre-conceived notions of what a physician is supposed to look like since her mother, an African American woman, was a doctor. However, Dr. Singh, like many other female physicians, still experiences the daily struggle of needing to assure people in her practice that she is the capable, competent physician in charge. She describes one incident in which she introduced herself as the doctor and spent 30 minutes with a patient performing procedures apt for a physician's training only to have the patient ask the nurse when the doctor was going to see him.

This issue of racial or gender discrimination not only applies to black physicians, but also extends to other minorities. In another article, written by family physician Dr. Pamela Wible, MD, several minority female physicians discuss their experiences of not allowing to give aid to passengers in mid-flight during an emergency due to discrimination. One particular account is given by internal medicine/geriatrics physician Dr. Miriam Anwar, MD. Dr. Anwar was aboard an Emirates flight when a male passenger was experiencing emphysema and an anxiety attack. The flight manager asked for Dr. Anwar's credentials and wouldn't let her help. In fact, he preferred that a white nurse assist the passenger. Dr. Anwar persisted to help the patient until another flight manager told her to return to her seat and let the nurse stay with him.

So what does a doctor look like? According to a 2013 survey by the Association of American Medical Colleges, Blacks and African Americans only comprised 4.1% of physicians in America while Hispanics made up 4.4%, and 48.9% were White. Of this 48.9 percent, men constituted 65% while women made up 35%. According to this 2013 data, a doctor looks like a white male. With such daunting statistics, one can understand how discriminatory ideas that doctors are only white males can feed into the implicit bias that some people possess. This is not to say that discriminating against a black female doctor from assisting another passenger is excusable-- in fact, situations like these should always be brought to light-- rather, these statistics should call for a need in an increase in the racial diversity of the very people who take care of us. To help prevent situations like this from occurring again, medical schools (besides minority serving institutions) need to increase their class diversity, television shows and other media outlets need to have leading minority physician characters, and patients and physicians need to acknowledge their bias and not allow it to lead to them making wrong assumptions. All in all, we need to be exposed to the fact that doctors are not just white men in white coats. Doctors are black women, Indian men, biracial Latinas, and everything in between. Doctors are people just like you and me, and we are not all white men.

Personally, as a Latina aspiring to become a physician, I hope that one day there will be such an enormous presence of female minority physicians that patients won't think to doubt that their doctor needs to be any other race or gender in order to provide healthcare. This is why I think it is important to recognize physicians like Dr. Cross, Dr. Singh, and Dr. Anwar and to also recognize that, as Ms. Angela Helm writes in theroot.com, black women have been doctors in the U.S. since Rebecca Lee Crumpler earned her M.D. in 1864.

Ten minutes after the patient was responding to the other physician's questions aboard Dr. Cross's flight, the flight attendant asked Dr. Cross what the next steps would be. Dr. Cross gave the patient the medical work up he needed and the man turned out ok. The color of Dr. Cross's skin never somehow made her unable to help save that man's life. The first mistake that that flight attendant made, like so many others, was using the color of one's skin as an indicator of competency. It never has been and it never will be.