This morning while I was going to get some hot water in my office, I decided to browse through some journals. This article in Annal of Internal Medicine caught my eye. Basically it discusses the impact of race on physicians of African descent. I know, I know ... thats old news. I admit I'm not a physician, I'm a pharmacist but as I browsed through the article, I saw many issues that were applicable to me.

Firstly, the difficulties in identifying and engaging role models and mentors. To digress a bit, I have often wondered why 90% of african pharmacists worked in retail settings. I mean, thats not necessarily wrong but its pretty much a dead end career (in my opinion) because you could work in that store for the rest of your life. After more than 5 years in such a setting, hospitals are reluctant to hire you because there is little clinical skills used in the retail setting and to work in a hospital, you have to be really careful as many of the patients are acutely ill. On graduating from school, I decided to pursue an administrative track so I had to complete a residency (or two).

The funny thing is that, there are so few african pharmacists in any administrative positions and its not so easy to talk to these other people because they really don't understand where you are coming from.

An editorial on this article summarizes it thus
"In brief, the physicians who participated felt that race permeated their experiences in the workplace, shaped their interpersonal interactions, and defined their institutional climate; their responses to racism ranged from minimization to confrontation; that the healthcare workplace is often silent on the issue of race and that these experiences can result in "racial fatigue," with personal and professional consequences."

One of the interviewees states "Race influences the personalities of Americans much more deeply than for Africans or other people not born in this country. As an african, my primary mode of identification is not race, still most people see me and for them its race."
How apt.

Many of the recurrent themes, I found very familiar: pride expressed by only patients of colors during encounters, feeling invisible at work, isolated and lacking of supportive mentors, frequently omitted from information networks and social situations, undervalued work and involuntarily "cast" into race-based roles in the workplace.

I guess the only thing I did not quite like about the article was the fact that only 5 of the 25 participants came to the United States as adults, that to me being the core Africans (no disrespect meant to anybody) I just wonder what difference our thicker accents etc would make to the results.

posted by lala @ 10:17 AM

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