The time I would spend understanding electrons and balancing reactions would never amount to the years I have spent watching those whose skin was saturated with melanin like mine lose their lives. The weeks I had spent preparing for that exam could never amount to the time and energy I have spent mourning Breonna Taylor. When white supremacy invades the bodies of those of us who dare to be Black, female, and breathing, it reproduces as a crippling affliction that accompanies us everywhere - physically, psychologically, and spiritually. The exam began, and I haven’t been able to show up mentally or emotionally in a science class since. The presence of the germ of white supremacy would cause a steric hindrance within me, slowing down and even preventing the reactions of learning and healing that I desperately needed for myself and from others in that moment.
A chronic pain, caused by the perpetuation of lethally unjust practices and compounded by the silence and avoidance between myself and my educators when it comes to Black women’s lives, would make its way through and onto neighboring cells within my physical being. They entered my bloodstream and catalyzed a metabolism that would allow for the invasion of my body by a violently infectious life form. That day, my body inhaled molecules of white supremacy as they seeped out of my computer from that proctored Zoom room. The “same day” isn’t necessarily the same as “before.” I took an inorganic chemistry exam the same day that a grand jury failed to charge two police officers with the murder of Breonna Taylor. A story of a great act of resistance: a Black woman choosing herself. It is a story of trying to mitigate chronic pain to create the possibility for genuine healing and recovery. While this isn’t just another story about the toxicity of pre-med culture, getting weeded out, or leaving my academic path for some earth-shattering love of another aspiration, it is a story of how white supremacy lives and breathes in each of our bodies, spreading between each of us - body to body - like contagion. To students, teachers, peers, and the Harvard community: This is my official farewell to the pre-medical track here at Harvard. OK, I’ll leave out her name because she’s just a kid.īut, other than no mention of hair-touching, this is the Platonic essence of black women’s op-eds during the Great Awokening. But, then again, Harvard students, especially Crimson writers …įrom the Harvard Crimson opinion section …Ī Pre-Med Letter of Resignation, With (Self) Love & Liberation Him, I couldn’t resist) and usually not at the expense of college students either. Normally, I try not to have fun at the expense of high school students (except for that hedge fund manager’s insufferable son who got into Stanford by writing “Black Lives Matter” 100 times. It’s as if white people implicitly exude a poison from their pores that harms only blacks, due to their being genetically different, although, as everyone also knows, genetic differences, like race, don’t exist. In 2021, the conventional wisdom is that while you almost never see white racism, it’s always out there somewhere, everywhere, ruining the lives of blacks, lowering their test scores and raising their murder rates. But the most informative comparison might be to the long, unfortunate hold of the miasma theory of disease on medical thought. Scientific-minded dissidents frequently compare today’s orthodoxy that the cause of whatever ails blacks is-and, indeed, must be-white racism to discarded scientific constructs such as phlogiston in chemistry and aether in physics. Back in February I wrote in “ The Miasma Theory of White Racism:”