Jasmine Brown - Twice as Hard: The Stories of Black Women Who Fought to Become Physicians, from the Civil War to the Twenty-First Century

A s I sat in my cramped dorm room in Oxford, England, I listened to a voice resonating through my laptop. It transported me to the other side of the world. Back home.

After I got a taste of this thing of college, then I had to have more of the same... I loved it... I mean, my getting back to college, I was delighted. Now my only fear there was that I could not possibly make enough money with my mother to go into the next year. So, I decided to make as much of that year as I could, you see. And so that I could at least say that I had two years of college, or three years of college, you see.

The sound of Dr. May Chinns voice seemed so familiar. It felt as though she was one of my great-grandmothers. Dr. Chinn and I were born a hundred years apart, and she passed away forty years ago. Still, her voice bent through time and touched my soul. I could imagine us sitting on a pillowy couch in a cozy living room, both sipping a hot cup of English Breakfast tea as she told me her life story. She bravely hurdled the challenges of being a black woman entering the unwelcoming field of medicine in the early twentieth century. And she came out on the other side in triumph as a skilled physician who made a huge impact in her patients lives.

Her story resonated with me. As a black woman medical student who will be the first in my family to become a physician, Ive faced my own set of trials. When Dr. Chinn recounted her experience with medical colleagues who disregarded and ostracized her, I felt the burn of salt being rubbed into wounds that have not had the opportunity to heal.

I t was the beginning of my junior year in college at Washington University in St. Louis, and my first day back in my neuroimmunology lab after a few weeks of vacation. I approached the labs entry door with my ID in hand. An older white man whom I didnt recognize trailed behind me. He didnt provide any explanation about his connection to the lab. I didnt request one. While the lab is large and composed of multiple smaller labs within one space, we have a culture of opening the door for one another. We assume good intent. This is the mindset I adopted as I prepared to give this unidentified man access to my lab.

Swipe. I placed my ID through the card reader, but a red light flashed in response. I reminded myself that this card reader was finicky. So I tried again.

Swipe, swipe. More red light. This time my cheeks flushed to match the color of the reader. It didnt make sense. My card was supposed to work. It had worked all summer. I had even spoken with technology services before my vacation to ensure that my card would still work when I returned for the school year. I was confident that the problem was with the card reader, not my card. So I tried again.

Swipe. Red light blinked back at me in innocence. I relented. Steeped in embarrassment, I asked the mystery man if he would open the door for us.

With raised suspicion, he countered, Are you supposed to be in this lab?

Immediately, my body froze. While his question may have seemed innocent, the doubt laced into his words brought me back to my childhood. Since elementary school, other kids have told me that I am stupid and will never belong in the highly praised realms of science and medicine. Youre black. Black people arent smart.

When my AP calculus teacher announced that I had scored at the top of my class on the midterm exam, my classmates looked at me with shock. I was the only black person in the room. They didnt understand how I couldve outperformed them on a test, let alone a math test. Then, as I neared the end of my high school career, people who claimed to be my friends suddenly turned on me. They confidently explained that I would get accepted into college because I was black. Not because I had a near perfect GPA with countless AP classes on my transcript, coupled with the fact that I was president of multiple organizations and a varsity athlete. My academic achievements were worthless in their eyes. The only purpose I served was filling a quota. To make matters worse, numerous classmates told me that I would never succeed in higher education or in a STEM career. I was a black woman, twice disadvantaged. Success was incompatible with my identity.

The mystery mans supposedly harmless question excavated immense pain that I had fought so hard to keep buried. Feeling like a deer in headlights, I answered his question without being able to vocalize the emotions that suddenly rushed over me. Yes. Im a student at Washington University, and I work here.

He was not convinced by my explanation. Can I see your ID?

I readily handed it over.

Why doesnt it look like my faculty ID?

Because Im a student. Im a student at the university.

My ID read Washington University in St. Louis at the top and had a recent photo of me in color, with the word Student below. After examining my identification, he remained skeptical. The air between us was tense. It was like I was a thief preparing to break into a lab to steal some chemicals. While I wasnt the most strategicchoosing to break in during work hours when the lab was filled with other peopleI was still a threat. And he was the (still-unidentified) cop ready to right my wrongs. But none of this was true. I was just a college student whose excitement to reenter this beloved space had suddenly transformed into sorrow. He continued his line of questioning, and I continued to answer helplessly. Eventually, he gave up his defense of the lab and opened the door. I followed him in and quickly went to my lab bench.

Soon, I realized that this man worked right next to my lab. His office adjoined the room where I prepared countless specimen trays for qPCR experiments. With my white coat on and my lab notebook in hand, I tried to walk confidently whenever we crossed paths. I wanted to prove to him that I was truly a scientist in this lab, not a thief, while ignoring the queasiness that arose whenever I saw him. After that incident, he never said anything to me again. Never looked me in the eye. Never acknowledged my presence or the pain that he had caused me.

Why did he treat me like that? Why didnt he believe me when I told him that I was a college student working in the lab? The day with the faulty card was the day that I realized I was the only black person in my lab. When I attended research talks in the building, I was always the only black person in the room. It seemed like I was the only black scientist in the entire seven-floor building. And I was only a student! The only other black people I saw working in the building were members of the janitorial or kitchen staff. I guess based on this data sample, it was reasonable for this man to assume that I wasnt a scientist in the labeven though my photo ID shouldve been enough proof that I truly was affiliated with the university.

Following the encounter with that man, I no longer felt excited to go to the lab each day. I felt anxious. My fast-beating heart tried to keep my feet from walking to the train station. The smell of urine in the underground station became more repugnant, threatening to induce nausea. The stares I received from people as I shuffled off the train and onto the medical campus seemed more aggressive, echoing the message from the man in my lab: You dont belong here. I felt like I was walking on eggshells. Something was bound to crack.