This Opinion piece is by Dr. Wolf Thyma, a first-year psychiatry resident at Université de Montréal. For more information about CBC’s Opinion section, please see the FAQ.
Born in Haiti, I immigrated to Canada at the age of seven. Proud of my modest origins, I always tell anyone who will listen that my parents led me to study law and medicine while they worked for minimum wage in factories in Montréal-Nord.
But I didn’t meet a Black doctor until I was 22 years old — a week before I was to begin medical school. When a Black woman picked me up in the waiting