“My pending exodus from academic medicine after 15 years…” This is how I started my piece recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine. I wrote my thoughts on what academia needs to do to right the wrongs that centuries of racism and anti-Blackness have created, but not on the experience that served as my final straw. A story in the news since then makes me want to share it now…
When I read the story about Grace , the 15 year-old Black girl in Michigan who was put in jail because she didn’t turn in her online homework and remains there more than two months later, I was reminded of the stories of police detaining, arresting, and physically assaulting Black children at much higher rates than White children and often for relatively minor misbehavior. Children like 6-year-old Kaia Rolle in Florida who was handcuffed for throwing a tantrum and like the 11-year-old Black girl in New Mexico who a police officer shoved against a wall and slammed to the ground because she took too many milks in the school cafeteria and picked at a sign taped to a door.
And they all remind me of me. Not because I was arrested or thrown in jail, but because the response to what I did wrong in academia was excessive and emblematic of society’s way of overreacting to the actions of Black girls and women.
I can admit that it was wrong of me to tweet almost exactly one year ago about the implicit bias I felt from a physician in training the day it happened. Though I mentioned no names, it was shortsighted of me to not foresee that others in the small program would see it and be able to identify the people involved. I should have waited longer. I should have further de-identified the tweet. But I was not wrong to call attention to the very real issue of trainees at all levels automatically regarding senior White male physicians with a level of respect not afforded more junior, female, and of color physicians. And I was not wrong to seek a community who would understand how it feels to be the only one like me.
Two months after that tweet, I informed a supervisor that I would be leaving my position because the work I was trying to do was not being supported or viewed as important enough to support and because I wanted to focus on my writing. The next day, that supervisor and their supervisor informed me that people had taken great issue with that tweet.
Two months and a day later.
In those two months, I attended meetings and clinics and interacted with people as my work routine entailed, completely oblivious to the fact that I was the subject of detailed conversations among fellows (physicians in medical specialty training), fellowship director, division chiefs, department chiefs, and university academic affairs leadership. Then I was told that I had misconstrued the incident I tweeted about in the first place because others involved weren’t White and they had denied any bias was at play—as if White people have a monopoly on anti-Blackness or as if after 40+ years of practice I had suddenly lost the ability to recognize the eyes and expressions and actions that communicate anti-Blackness. Then I was told fellows were no longer allowed to work with me because they feared I might tweet about them. Then I was told that had I intended to stay involved in trainee education, I would have to sign a disclosure that I would never, ever, never ever ever, tweet about trainees again.
When I reflect on the situation, I can’t help but believe the reaction would have been different had I tweeted about something other than implicit bias, or if I had been someone other than a Black woman. I believe this because when a senior White male physician did a blatantly unprofessional, racist and misogynistic thing to me (which by the way he denied too), his supervisor said nothing to him about it, but immediately encouraged me to take down my blog post about it. I believe this because in spite of a senior White male physician berating staff and trainees to the point of tears for their perceived stupidity for years, he was named a division chief.
The appropriate reaction to my wrongdoing would have been for a supervisor to talk to me about the situation when they became aware of it and instruct me not to tweet identifiably again. I won’t hold my breath waiting for any of those involved in the overreaction to admit they were wrong too.