“Racism makes you feel ‘less’ — like you don’t belong in that space,” says African paediatrician Nadia Sam-Agudu
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“I was treated as if I was dirty,” says Sam-Agudu. That was just the start: she experienced racism all through her US academic and clinical training. At Mayo Medical School in Rochester, Minnesota and during a residency and fellowship at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, she says, some supervisors gave more time and attention to white male colleagues and “barely spoke to me”. It nearly derailed her quest to improve health care for children in Africa.
The things that threaten to chip away at her confidence and resolve, however, have never gone away. “Racism makes you feel ‘less’ — like you don’t belong in that space,” says Sam-Agudu. It kills the motivation, passion and confidence that researchers need to pursue their careers, she says. And that’s why, when someone treats her disrespectfully, Sam-Agudu wonders whether they are doing so because it’s the norm in academia or because they presume a Black African to be incompetent.
One instance that sticks with her was an e-mail thread in which she discussed some unpublished research with her co-authors. Sam-Agudu raised the need for them to explain the ethics approach for consent in the manuscript. According to Sam-Agudu: “All this person had to do was confirm this and state it in the affirmative.” Instead, she received a snide response that she felt belittled her. “[It] was uncalled for and disrespectful,” she says.
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