October 30, 2019 was my last day of clinical practice at UCSF. But it wasn’t until June 30, 2023, that the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) no longer gets to claim my identifiers of being Black and a woman as a testament to their “commitment to diversity,” when the reality is that fewer than 1% of its faculty at the associate professor (my title when I left) are Black. The technical delay in complete separation was to allow me to spend down the remainder of my grant funding. Because I don’t believe in leaving my money on the table. Perhaps it’s my free school lunch background that has made me this way.
For those not familiar with the ways of academia, faculty rank is a marker of the significance of one’s research, teaching and service to the institution. It usually takes six years to be promoted and a myriad of factors directly or indirectly related to racism, results in diminishing numbers of Black faculty ascending the rank ladder. According to 2020 data from the American Association of Medical Colleges, 4.6% of full-time medical school faculty at the assistant professor level were Black, while 3.4% of associate professors and 2.1% of full professors were Black.
My departure was quite painful at first, because as a colleague put it: I was pushed out (to stay meant being effectively silenced) as much as I was being pulled to something else (my writing). I had envisioned myself as being among the handful of Black faculty who made it to full professor, in part because academia has a way of making its people believe that academia is the only way to have significant impact as a physician. And so we put up with the toxicity and the microaggressions because for so many of us, it is about so much more than us as individuals. For so many of us, it’s about an entire community. At least it was for me.
Well, Dear Ones, academia lied. Academia is but one of the ways.
I know this to be true because this year I was named as 1 of 46 STATUS List honorees. A panel of STAT News editors and reporters spends months refining “the most definitive accounting of leaders and influencers in the life sciences,” with the number is 46 in homage to the number of chromosomes in the human DNA.
This recognition means a lot to me, as I’ve never have I been awarded anything that I didn’t work my ass off to get. And it’s even sweeter that it was in recognition of my work outside of academia: Black Doc Village, my writing, and my efforts to eliminate race-based medicine.
So, my advice for young Black physicians contemplating if a career in academia, particularly in predominantly-White institutions, is right for them: Don’t do it because you believe the hype that academia is the only way you can be successful. We are needed everywhere, so follow your passion and you can’t go wrong.
