So these days, I'm not staying quiet. I'm speaking up about a lot of things, even when it makes listeners uncomfortable, even when it makes me uncomfortable. And a lot of this is about racial disparities and institutionalized racism, things that we're not supposed to have in this country anymore, certainly not in the practice of medicine or public health. But we have them, and we pay for them in lives cut short. That's why sounding the alarm about the impact of racism on health in the United States, the ongoing institutional and interpersonal violence that people of color face, compounded by our tragic legacy of 250 years of slavery, 90 years of Jim Crow and 60 years of imperfect equality, sounding the alarm about this is central to doing my job right as New York City's Health Commissioner. In New York City, premature mortality — that's death before the age of 65 — is 50 percent higher for black men than white ones. A black woman in 2012 faced more than 10 times the risk of dying related to childbirth as a white woman. And though we've made enormous strides in reducing infant mortality rates, a black baby still faces nearly three times the risk of death in its first year of life as compared to a white baby.