I was on the SF Muni train on my way to lab the day the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action. I remember staring at my phone for a moment before swiping out of my news app and opening Instagram. I mindlessly reposted Canva-made infographics and video essay think pieces. I saw posts from friends and mutuals and some of the tears they shed, but I honestly felt nothing. Frankly, the ruling was a confirmation of something many Black students already understood: that our presence in academic spaces has always been conditional and could be revoked at any moment.
I walked into lab that morning trying to focus on preparing a flow cytometry experiment while simultaneously working on my medical school applications. But as I read through my “Why MD” essay, my mind kept drifting back to December 1, 2016: the day I was admitted to the University of Chicago (UChicago) as a Questbridge Scholar, a full-ride scholarship for first-generation, low-income students. Getting into UChicago was one of the best days of my life, and I still look back on the excitement and tears I shed on that day and smile. But it is difficult to revisit that memory without also remembering how quickly my accomplishment became the subject of gossip in my high school International Baccalaureate class. It certainly didn’t help that my acceptance was only three weeks following Trump’s first election victory, during a moment when conversations and the language around race, education, merit, and Blackness were becoming visibly uglier. Suddenly, people, including one of my teachers, openly questioned how “someone like me” could have gotten into a school like UChicago.
I found myself thinking about these experiences again recently while watching the relentless political and cultural attacks against Black trainees in medicine unfold in public.
In May 2026, the Department of Justice (DOJ) concluded that the University of California (UC), Los Angeles’ David Geffen School of Medicine had illegally considered race in its admissions process following a 2025 inquiry. One week later, it published identical findings about Yale School of Medicine. Neither school has faced penalties yet, but the message to every medical school in the country was immediate and unmistakable: Diversity is now legally precarious. And the campaign is not stopping. The DOJ has since opened investigations into UC San Diego, Stanford University, and Ohio State University, demanding seven years of admissions data under threat of losing hundreds of millions in National Institutes of Health research funding.
Since the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling, dozens of universities have quietly scaled back or restructured their diversity-focused admissions programs, mentorship pipelines, and scholarship opportunities. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), the first medical school class selected after the Supreme Court's affirmative action ruling saw Black matriculants drop by 11.6 percent and Hispanic matriculants fall by 10.8 percent, representing the equivalent of losing over 250 Black medical students and over 300 Hispanic medical students in a single year. American Indian and Alaska Native students fared even worse, with enrollment collapsing by 22.1 percent. Crucially, these declines happened even though Black and Hispanic applications increased. First-generation and low-income matriculants also declined, by 2.3 percent and 2.1 percent respectively, continuing a years-long downward trend that predates the ruling and has only steepened since.
On July 1, 2026, this trend is about to get significantly worse as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act goes into effect. The bill caps federal student loan borrowing for medical students at $50,000 per year and $200,000 over a lifetime, and it eliminates the Grad PLUS loan program entirely for new borrowers. The average cost of attending medical school in the United States already exceeds $250,000 when tuition, fees, and these loan caps further entrench the lack of socioeconomic diversity that has long defined medicine. The AAMC has warned that these changes could worsen the physician shortage and further narrow the already shrinking pathway to medicine for students without generational wealth.
All of this is what makes the discourse surrounding affirmative action so deeply frustrating. Elite education did not suddenly become equitable after the end of race-conscious admissions. Highly selective universities and medical schools remain overwhelmingly shaped by wealth, legacy admissions, social capital, private education, and generational access to opportunity. At Harvard University, 43 percent of white admits between 2009 and 2018 were recruited athletes, legacy students, children of faculty and staff, or applicants whose relatives had donated to the university. Seventy percent of Harvard's legacy applicants are white. At the University of Notre Dame, legacies outnumber Black students five to one. Yet public outrage continues to fixate on the comparatively tiny number of Black students admitted to these institutions. The scapegoat has not changed even as the policy that supposedly justified the scapegoating no longer exists.
No one questions whether the child of two physicians belongs in medicine. No one assumes a legacy student is inherently unqualified. No one frames inherited academic access as an unfair advantage with the same venom reserved for diversity initiatives. But let a first-generation Black student succeed, and suddenly merit becomes a national obsession. And Black trainees thus are not allowed to be seen as future physicians, scientists, or colleagues, but as ideological intrusions into spaces imagined as belonging to someone else.
Earlier this year, I posted on social media about how the first-year class at my medical school had only four Black students out of 176. I noted that there were more students in my class who owned Canada Goose jackets than there were Black students, let alone Black and first-generation low-income students. The responses were immediate. Some were sympathetic. But many were not. Some said four was already too many. Others called me a monkey and other words I’ll leave to your imagination.
So I’ll admit, writing this is honestly frightening. I know what people try to do to trainees like me who dare to speak up for what I believe is the bare minimum of human dignity. But despite that fear, I want to remind the public and especially my colleagues in medicine and science of something important: The hostility many Black trainees experience did not begin with the Supreme Court’s decision in June 2023, and it will not end there either.
The hallways may change—high schools, universities, medical schools, hospitals, research labs, lecture seminar halls—but the underlying message often remains the same: Black people are not supposed to be here.
Yet we are here anyway.
We are here despite educational systems that chronically underfund our communities. We are here having navigated institutions without the financial safety nets, professional inheritance, or familial familiarity that cushion so many others. We are here despite constantly being asked to justify our existence in spaces that celebrate resilience while punishing the people forced to embody it. We are here, and we will continue to be here—not because the system has become generous, but because we have refused to let it be the final word.
The truth is that Black students did not break higher education or medicine. We simply exposed how fragile the mythology surrounding them has always been and how much work remains to build something worthy of the name.
