White Women In Medicine Neglect Pregnant Black Women
White Women In Medicine Have Always Neglected Pregnant Black Women. The Dallas Incident Just Caught It On Camera
A viral TikTok video from Dallas Regional Medical Center wasn’t just a case of bad bedside manners. It was a real-time illustration of what medical racism looks like when it’s no longer hiding behind charts, numbers, and euphemisms.
A pregnant Black woman, Karrie Jones, twelve minutes away from delivering her child, sits in a wheelchair screaming in agony, rocking, sweating, and pleading through contractions that are taking her breath away. And the white nurse, inches away, won’t even look at her. There’s no urgency and no recognition that this is a medical emergency. Just the stiff, hollow performance of bureaucracy and annoying questions.
“How many times have you been pregnant?”
“You have two babies at home?”
“Who’s your doctor?”
Each question lands like a challenge, not a clinical check-in. The nurse keeps her back to this woman as if proximity alone might stain her.
That posture is centuries of medical practice that has trained health providers to view Black women as exaggerating, inconvenient, and less deserving of care. A Black woman is literally crowning, saying that the baby is “in my ass,” and this nurse is treating her pain like background noise.
What that moment lays bare in the bright, humiliating glare of cellphone footage is not just one nurse’s indifference. It exposed the quiet violence of centuries-old racist white women’s habits reenacting themselves through a modern uniform. That cold shoulder, that averted gaze, that mechanical recitation of intake questions while a Black woman is literally telling you her child is emerging. What we see in this video is the embodied memory of a role white women have played since the plantation.
White women have been nurses, midwives, matrons, “keepers,” and supervisors in every era of American medical history. They were the ones who policed enslaved women’s reproduction. They monitored pregnancies for profit. They enforced breeding schedules. They supervised forced weaning. They assisted white doctors during gynecological experiments on enslaved women’s bodies. They pushed Black women out of hospitals during Jim Crow. They decided who was “clean,” who was “unruly,” who was “cooperative,” who was “lying,” who was “hysterical,” who was “too much trouble.” They were the “respectable” face of racist medical authority and the soft glove over the hard fist.
And that history lives in the posture of that Dallas nurse. It lives in the back turned toward a suffering Black woman and her refusal to make eye contact. In the way the nurse’s body language says, your pain is an inconvenience, not an emergency. In the way she interrogates rather than responds. In the way she treats imminent birth not as a crisis, but as an irritant. There is a way white women in these roles have learned to act as the buffer between Black women and the care we deserve. They do not have to raise their voice. Their indifference does the work.
This nurse should have checked her immediately, done a quick visual exam, initiated fetal monitoring, ensured stabilization, and prioritized the safety of both mother and baby over the damn paperwork. This is not an isolated incident. Black women in the U.S. are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women. Three times. Not because our bodies are broken, but because the system is.
And if anybody needs further proof that this is systemic and not situational, they only have to look about a thousand miles away to Crown Point, Indiana.
Another Black woman, Mercedes Wells, in active labor, walked into Franciscan Health Hospital. She told the nurses she felt the baby coming. And instead of helping her, they discharged her. They sent her away. They told a woman whose uterus was literally pushing out a child to go home, wait, and come back.
She didn’t even make it home. Minutes after leaving the hospital, Mercedes gave birth with the help of her husband as they drove to another community hospital where a team of nurses and doctors was waiting for them.
Two different women. Two hospitals, two states, and the same refusal to believe Black women when their bodies are literally delivering the truth. We keep witnessing the same institutional suspicion and the same passive neglect. The same dismissal of our pain. The same deadly calculus: She’ll be fine. She’s exaggerating. She can wait, just like Karrie Jones.
“Do y’all treat all your patients like this or just the Black ones?” Jones’ mother asked the Dallas nurse, Lacrista Vaughn, who is under investigation. That question in the Dallas video wasn’t rhetorical. It’s a question that’s been echoing for generations.
Black women know this story already. We live it. We survive it. We warn our daughters about it the same way our mothers warned us. There is nothing “shocking” about what happened in Dallas or Indiana, not to us. We’ve seen this script run so many times it’s practically a genre. The only difference now is that we have cell-phone footage instead of yellowed newspaper clippings, live-streamed indifference instead of whispered obituary lines.
Because if you go into the archives, you’ll find the same headlines repeating like a curse. Black women turned away from whites-only hospitals as their contractions closed in. Black women dying in the back seats of cars because their neighborhoods were deliberately starved of medical facilities. Black women giving birth on sidewalks outside emergency rooms that refused to open their doors. Nurses tossing sheets over them like they were trying to hide the evidence of their own cruelty. Mothers bleeding out on cold pavement while staff stepped over them. Babies arriving in the rain and snow and learning what their mother’s life and their own entry into this world were worth to this country.
What we’re witnessing now is the continuation of a lineage and tradition of medical neglect so old it predates our grandmothers’ grandmothers. This isn’t about one nurse having a bad day. It isn’t about one hospital making a “mistake.” It’s an entire system working exactly as designed.
Moments like these expose exactly what this country really thinks about Black babies in a nation that swears it “cares about the unborn.” This nation drafts laws to police our uteruses, claims the moral high ground of “protecting life,” but can’t even muster basic human urgency when a Black woman is literally bringing life into the world right in front of them.
The undeniable truth is that Black mothers and Black babies are never the ones being protected in those policy debates. We are the exception, the expendable category, and proof that “pro-life” stops at the color line.
Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of “Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.” Read her Substack here.
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