Equal Treatment is a 501(c)(3) non-profit committed to the promotion of racial justice in academic surgery.
We believe in the power of surgeons to work toward racial justice.
Surgeons often care for the people most left behind by medicine and society. We recognize and are outraged by the impact of racism on our patients’ lives: we discover colon cancers when they have become obstructing masses after decades of poor screening, we amputate limbs rendered unsalvageable by years of diabetes; we bear witness to suffering, triumph and the community of support that wraps our patients in.
We acknowledge that healthcare disparities are rooted in complex social and political histories that can be difficult to address in the clinic and operating room. Our vision is to form a surgical workforce that is representative of the patients we serve, equipped with the tools to combat racial inequality in our healthcare system.
Team:
Dr. Hattie Huston-Paterson is a resident surgeon at UCLA. She has worked on racial discrimination and civil rights policy at both the UN Human Rights Council and the U.S. Department of Justice. Her research focuses on the impact of structural violence and racism on health outcomes. She was a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellow in African and Zulu Studies, and obtained her MD from the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a BA/MA from the University of Oxford.
Dr. Amanda Labora is a resident surgeon at UCLA. She was born and raised in Miami, FL and is a proud dual-citizen of the United States and Mexico. Prior to medical school, she completed a Fulbright research fellowship on obstetric violence at the INSP in Cuernavaca, Mexico. She approaches her clinical and academic work through a reproductive justice lens, which calls for personal autonomy and the just redistribution of power and resources to communities of color. She holds an MD from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA from Brown University.
Sonia Cristina Suárez is an educator and scholar of Ethnic Studies. She teaches topics in Afro-Indigenous-Latinx/Chicanx, Native American, and Asian American Studies, as well as interdisciplinary research methods in science and technology studies. Sonia’s expertise centers on femme/women of color embodied and ancestral healing knowledges, the racialized and gendered diseases of modern times, and health disparities along lines of race and sex. She is completing her PhD in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, and holds an MA from Berkeley and BS from Northwestern University.
Dr. Horace M. Delisser is the Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania where he leads the Program for Diversity and Inclusion. As the Associate Dean for Professionalism and Humanism, he directs the professionalism and humanism module of the medical student curriculum. Through this position, he has led curricular innovations in the teaching of social medicine, medical humanities and spirituality and health and in promoting medical student wellness and self-care.
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