There is a particular grief that comes not from losing something you had, but from losing something you believed in. A quieter grief. The kind that doesn’t announce itself — it just settles, slowly, into the way you see the world.
When I was a child, doctors were almost sacred in my family. They studied longer than anyone else. They wore white. They spoke carefully. There was something about the white coat that felt like a promise — that this person had given years of their life to the singular purpose of preserving yours. I wanted to be one of them. I wanted to be someone who mattered in that way.
Lawyers held a different kind of weight. They were the ones who stood beside the people who had nothing — the widows, the orphans, the ones the world had already decided didn’t matter. They took an oath too. On paper, both looked honorable. On paper, both were exactly what a child could believe in.
Then I grew up. And the eyes that had been wide with wonder opened wider — but this time with something else entirely.
I’m still not sure I have a word for what I felt when I learned about J. Marion Sims. I don’t think I’ve finished processing it. I’m not sure I ever will. He is celebrated in history as the father of modern gynecology. What history is slower to say is that he built that legacy on the bodies of enslaved Black women — performing repeated, experimental surgeries on them without anesthesia, without consent, without ever seeming to ask whether their pain was real or whether it mattered.
Anarcha Westcott. Lucy. Betsey. Their names deserve more than a footnote.
The thing that stays with me — that I keep returning to without resolution — is not only what he did. It is that he did not do it alone. There were other men in that room. Men who also wore white coats. Men who had also taken oaths. And they were silent. The whole world was silent. And in that silence, something that was supposed to be honorable became something else entirely.
I wonder how those men slept. I wonder if they told themselves it was science. I wonder if the oath ever came back to them in the night, the way it comes back to me now — heavy, hollow, like a promise that was never meant for everyone.
The law is no different, not in the ways that matter. I have watched and read and understood what happens when someone who looks a certain way walks into a courtroom. The lawyer who was supposed to fight for them has already made a quiet decision, before the evidence, before the argument, before the truth has had a chance to speak. Guilt decided by skin. Innocence made impossible by birth.
They took oaths too, these lawyers. To defend every client. To pursue justice without favor. But an oath only holds the people who meant it when they said it — and some of them were never speaking to everyone in the room.
I don’t write this with rage. I’m past the rage, or the rage has changed shape into something heavier and quieter. I write this because I still remember the child I was — the one who looked at a white coat and saw safety, who believed that some professions were built on something solid, something true.
What I know now is that a profession is only as honorable as the people who practice it. And people carry everything into the room with them — their fears, their biases, their willingness to look away. The oath doesn’t change that. The years of study don’t change that. The white coat doesn’t change that.
These were supposed to be honorable jobs. Some people made them that. Others wore the title and hollowed it out from the inside, quietly, while the world looked on and called it normal. That is the part I cannot make peace with — not the failure itself, but how easily it was accepted. How few people thought to ask who the oath was really for.
Salima
Just me thinking out loud over here