Equity

INTRODUCTION

The Virtue of Equity

On a bright August day in 1976, my Indian parents arrived in New York City with one suitcase, twenty dollars, and my mother pregnant with me. Without Google, they found their way from the airport to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where they had secured medical residency positions at a local hospital. They began working at a time when New York City’s financial mismanagement, high drug use, and racist “War on Crime” had created an atmosphere of civil war. My father saw more gunshot wounds in one night in the emergency room than in four years of surgical residency in England. For months, my very pregnant mother slept in a sleeping bag on the floor of their apartment. During the New York City blackout of 1977, my father ...