Blacker Than Bald Eagles

Editor’s Note: This piece was awarded an honorable mention in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”

In the 1990s, having grown up in Texas and spent the summer before college playing semiprofessional basketball in Australia, I went to medical school at Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara, in Mexico.

While there, I experienced a striking and unexpected sense of safety. Although the people there normally never see Black people, they treated me differently from the way Black people are treated in the US.

In contrast to my white colleagues, who were frequently targeted and robbed, I felt safe from police harassment and the racially based murders that we witness weekly in the US. It was almost as if my classmates’ and my respective experiences of unsafety had been reversed.

When I was growing up, my parents taught me that my Black skin color makes some non-Black people perceive me as “armed and dangerous.” In law enforcement, there is a widespread perception that Black men are dangerous and intimidating—that if, for whatever reason, an officer feels threatened, we should be met with deadly force. I learned that the burden was on me to ensure that I made it home safely, without being killed by the police.

I have endured numerous encounters with police in Chicago, Texas and New York—for fabricated infractions such as having factory-tinted windows, wearing no seatbelt or speeding. In every instance, I’ve had to remain calm and respectful while talking to an officer who kept a hand on his firearm the whole time. I’ve learned how to de-escalate these situations, though that’s no guarantee of a good outcome.

But it is disheartening, to say the least, to feel that your life is not valued in your home country—that police are allowed to prey on Black citizens, and that you’re simply waiting your turn.

As a Black man and a Black male physician, a minority in medicine, I live in an alternate America.

One time in Chicago, the police pulled me over and asked to see the buyer’s order for my Range Rover. They said it was “standard protocol,” but if I’d been white, there would have been no such encounter.

After starting my medical residency in Upstate New York, I was once followed by a police officer for two miles, through seven stoplights.

He pulled me over, asked if I drank and made me do a Breathalyzer test. Yelling at me to keep my hands up, he ran a license check—then came back looking as if he’d seen a ghost, having confirmed that I was a medical resident at the local hospital.

“I’d be a jackass if I gave a fellow civil servant a ticket,” he said. “Have a nice day, Doc.”

A ticket for what? I thought. Okay, he apologized and let me go—but only after he’d treated me like a criminal.

This led to other equally bitter thoughts: What about Black men who aren’t physicians? Are their lives less valuable? Is being a doctor the only thing that saves my life in police encounters—the only thing that disarms them and makes them feel safe from a 6’3″, 240-pound Black guy?

Three months later, as the designated driver for my white friend/co-resident, who’d been drinking, I was pulled over for speeding. I have a bright red insurance card with registration; I held it between my fingers, keeping both hands on the wheel, as the police approached the car. I was asked to step out and take a sobriety test.

As I touched my nose and walked a straight line, I tried to disarm the officers with humor: “Oh, you want to test my cerebellum, eh? It definitely works, see?”

“How did you know that?” one asked. “Are you a doctor or something?”

“Yes, I’m a physician,” I told him. “I don’t drink and drive, and I don’t do drugs, and alcohol intoxication affects your cerebellum’s ability to modulate balance. I had a patient die today, and my friend and I were hanging out.”

The officer’s partner proceeded to search my Range Rover for drugs. I passed the sobriety test, then was let go with a warning about speeding. Again, “standard protocol” was the pretext—but I didn’t voice any objection, because I wanted to live to see my children again.

“Well, he was nice, at least,” said my white friend. “He let you go.”

“He didn’t ‘let me go,’ man; I was innocent,” I said, irritated at his implication that the officer had been “nice” for not harassing or shooting me. “I didn’t drink anything. And why, for speeding, do I need to step out of my vehicle and have my car searched? WTF are you talking about?”

Some may ask why I allowed the police to illegally search my vehicle. Here is my answer.

As a Black man, I live in a different America than my non-Black peers. I’m constantly in survival mode: fearful, hypervigilant, just wanting to make it home without incident. I know what it means to refrain from defending myself—to just endure abuse—in order to avoid more deadly retaliation.

There is literally no governmental or legal entity in America that protects Black men, or Black people generally. I know what it’s like to be afraid to call the police for help. Seeing men who look like me be murdered in real time on camera is traumatizing, and it confirms how little this country values the lives of men who look like me.

It is emotionally draining to have to deal with the gaslighting and systemic racism embedded in daily life—and in the medical workplace. It doesn’t matter what medical specialty you practice: All specialties have both systemic and overt racism.

In my specialty, psychiatry, patients often come into the emergency room intoxicated, manic, psychotic, belligerent and violent to the point of requiring physical restraints. In my presence, they frequently hurl racial epithets.

During my years as a psychiatry resident, I heard slurs like “monkey” and the N-word literally thousands of times. It forced me to develop a thick skin, because, as I learned, my non-Black colleagues didn’t always speak up to defend me or condemn the behavior—as if a patient’s mental illness made racial slurs acceptable.

Racial bias shows up in less obvious ways, too. Once I was rounding on a diabetic patient scheduled for an above-the-knee amputation. Accompanied by several medical students, I wore my white coat and ID tag, which displayed my name and credentials—MD, PhD.

“Hello, I’m Dr. Nnamdi,” I said, then listened to the man’s heart and lungs.

As I examined his abdomen, he suddenly said, “No way you’re the doctor—you’re the dietician who took away my pancakes.”

Seemingly finding this cute, my white physician-assistant student laughed. The patient glanced at her, then evidently decided that she must be the doctor. Ignoring me and the other medical students (who were Korean and Filipino), he directed his comments to her.

To top it all off, reflecting on the race-related trauma that Black people suffer daily, directly or indirectly, I’m amazed that psychiatry’s definition of post-traumatic stress disorder does not even include trauma witnessed through media, such as the murder of George Floyd. Instead, the PTSD diagnosis mostly embraces the perspective of white male war veterans as victims of trauma. Black men can die on camera and still not be seen, still not feel protected.

I can’t help comparing this treatment of Black people with the way America treats its national emblem, the bald eagle—iconic symbol of freedom and equality. Once an endangered species, bald eagles were rescued from extinction by vigorous governmental action.

Unlike me, a bald eagle is valued, honored and offered protected status by federal law.

Imagine that.