Damon Tweedy

Damon Scott Tweedy is an American physician who is an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine. In 2015 Tweedy published his memoir, Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor's Reflections on Race and Medicine. In 2024 he published another book Facing the Unseen: The Struggle to Center Mental Health in Medicine.

Early life and education Tweedy was born into a socially conservative family. He was an undergraduate student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County where he played UMBC Retrievers men's basketball. Tweedy was a student at the Duke University School of Medicine in the mid-1990s, and experienced racism as commonplace in society and medicine. As a medical student, Tweedy was mistaken by a professor for a caretaker. He has said that he was worried that he was a product of affirmative action. After graduating in medicine, Tweedy moved to Yale University, where he studied law. He attributes the inequity in outcomes to mistrust of African-American people in their majority white doctors, and the mistrust of physicians in their African-American patients.

Book In 2015 Tweedy published his memoir, Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor's Reflections on Race and Medicine, which explores race and its interactions with medicine. The book was well received by critics. The British Medical Journal admired "Tweedy's unflinching honesty and fierce introspection." It was also recommended reading by Oprah's Book Club and Entertainment Weekly.

Selected publications