You may recall that late last week, a Denver-area doctor, Michelle Herren, came under well-deserved fire for an unbelievably racist Facebook tirade against Michelle Obama. She suggested that the First Lady wasn’t really speaking with the kind of eloquence you would expect from an Ivy Leaguer, but was actually a “monkey face” who spoke “poor ebonic English.” Incredibly, she claimed with a straight face that she wasn’t being racist. Her employers at Denver Health Medical Center didn’t see it that way, and barred her from seeing patients pending investigation.
Well, it didn’t take long for Herren to see the handwriting on the wall. On Friday, she resigned her post as a pediatric anesthesiologist at Denver Health. She had been at the hospital since 2006. However, she didn’t do herself any favors in an interview with KMGH-TV in Denver. Watch here.
Herren told KMGH’s Molly Hendrickson that she didn’t know “monkey face” was racist, and her remarks had been taken out of context. Herren claimed that she was responding to a post arguing that if anyone said the same things about Michelle Obama that they do about Melania Trump, they’d immediately be branded as racist.
So let’s see if we’ve got this right. A doctor claims, with a straight face, that she doesn’t know calling a black person a “monkey” is racist? If you believe that, there’s a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you. Apparently Herren knew she’d stepped in it, because she resigned soon after that interview. Her Facebook page has also been removed from public view.
This completed one of the most ignominious falls from grace in recent memory for a doctor. Just 24 hours before she resigned from Denver Health, she lost her post as an unpaid faculty member at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. School officials announced that she had effectively been suspended with intent to dismiss for what spokesman Mark Crouch described as “values that are at odds” with CU and “compromised her ability to meet the teaching and patient care mission of the School of Medicine.”
Herren’s resignation avoided what would have potentially been a messy legal battle. Denver Health serves a sizable number of minority patients; indeed, the post came to light after a woman who is a mutual friend of one of Herren’s Facebook friends asked whether it was appropriate for a doctor who makes such hateful remarks to be treating black and Latino kids. On paper, there would have been no defensible reason to keep Herren on the payroll.
However, legal experts say that it isn’t that cut and dried, since Denver Health is a public hospital that is an arm of the city of Denver. Lorrie Ray of the Mountain States Employers Council said that a public hospital has to take care not to violate a staffer’s First Amendment rights when he or she makes an offensive social media post on his or her own time. Under those circumstances, Denver Health would have had to prove that Herren’s actions were a matter of public concern that disrupted the workplace.
Herren’s resignation was probably the first smart thing she’s done in awhile. I would hope that no anesthesiology practice in the Denver area is desperate enough or disreputable enough to hire her.
