by Bennet Omalu
I approached a handful of other people. All sidestepped me or ignored me or gave me a look that said, “Go away.” No one helped me. I did a quick check of my breath to see if it so offended people that I drove them away. All the while, the need to urinate had reached crisis proportions. I stood in the middle of the concourse, unsure what to do next. I danced a bit and grabbed at my crotch like a three-year-old boy who waits until the last possible moment to put down his toys and relieve himself.
Finally, an older Hispanic woman who worked for the airport as a housekeeper came over to me. She had a garbage bag in her hand. “Sir, do you need to find a place to pee?” she asked.
“Yes. Desperately,” I said.
“Follow me,” she said. Thankfully she walked fast. She led me to a sign marked “Men’s Restroom.” “Go inside, and you will find a toilet,” she said.
The sign did not make sense, but I did not have time to think very deeply about it. I dashed inside, looked around, and found what I was looking for just in time. Okay, I said to myself, restroom means toilet. I must remember that. I had just learned my first cultural lesson in America.
After relieving myself, I went out and found the woman who had directed me to the restroom. “Thank you!” I said.
“You are welcome,” she said with an accent. I did not ask her about her situation, but her accent told me that she had come to the United States from another country and could therefore relate to my cultural confusion.
I had another quick “you’re not in Nigeria anymore” moment before I got on my plane bound for Seattle. As I walked to my gate, I saw two people in a passionate embrace, who then engaged in a very long kiss. I didn’t say anything, nor did I stare. Their business was their business, not mine. However, I did think to myself, That’s something you never see in Nigeria. In my home country, people reserve such shows of affection for the privacy of their own home. I got another shock as I glanced back at the couple. It was not a man and woman kissing, but two men. A little voice in my heart said, “Bennet, welcome to America.”
• • • •
My flight to the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport landed around 9:30 at night. I walked off the plane with $250 in my pocket. The secretary of the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Washington was waiting at the gate for me, along with another African postgraduate student. I think he was from Zaire or the Congo or the Central African Republic. I don’t remember which. They took me to the house where the other grad student stayed. He introduced me to the owners of the house, an elderly white woman and her blind, middle-aged son. They had an attic room they said I could rent for about $30 for the night. Not knowing where else to go, I took it. Later I rented the room for about $180 a month.
My new temporary home sat in a predominantly white neighborhood not far from the university. The location was perfect, although the room was cramped and the bed quite small, even for a small man like me. Nevertheless, I took it. Before I left Nigeria, my father and mother had advised me not to judge things on face value. Things that glitter and look wonderful to the eye may not be good for me; therefore I must be careful. This room definitely did not glitter, but it was everything I needed. That’s why I took it.
Classes started right after I arrived in Washington. Very quickly I found myself caught up in the frantic pace of classes, seminars, and assignments. I worked to keep up, while also adapting to a very different culture from the one in which I had spent my entire life. Even in the midst of the hustle and bustle of the university, I felt very lonely. The depression that I had wrestled with for so long returned. That surprised me. I believed that once I came to America, with the hope of a new life, my depression would leave and never return. Perhaps I needed to rethink the idea of leaving God’s help behind in Nigeria.
Not every surprise in my new home was negative. There was a grocery store near my house I went to daily because I did not have a refrigerator. My jaw dropped the first time I walked in the store. Never before had I seen such variety and quality. One entire wall had nothing but bread on it. White bread. Wheat bread. Sourdough bread. Low-fat bread. Non-fat bread. Bread, bread, and more bread. What an amazing place to live!
I soon discovered a dark side to this amazing place. My first few times in the store, I was so overwhelmed trying to navigate my way around that I did not notice one of the store employees following me. I only noticed him when he asked if I needed any help. “No, thank you,” I said and went on my way.
The next time I was in the store, the same employee followed me around. Once again he asked if I needed any help. I gave the same answer. I noticed he continued following me anyway. Again, he asked if I needed help. I noticed he asked with a false smile on his face—the kind that people put on to appear sincere when they are anything but.
After a couple of weeks of the same employee following me around the store, I began to suspect something was up. I looked around, and it finally hit me: I was the only person of color in the store, and the only one being followed. I also noticed a difference in the way the cashier spoke to me when I paid for my groceries. Those in line in front of me were greeted with a warm smile and a sunny “hello.” When it was my turn, I received a suspicious look and a grunt.
The people in the predominantly white neighborhood also acted strangely around me. Several times I noticed people crossing over to the other side of the street when I approached them on the sidewalks. When I walked down the street at night, cars switched on their high beams.
Police cruisers sometimes followed me very slowly down my street. Often the officer pulled up to me and started asking questions like, “Where are you going? What is your business in this neighborhood?” I answered all the questions as politely as I could. I assumed they asked everyone they did not recognize the same sort of questions. However, even after it should have been clear I was no stranger in this neighborhood, the questions from police officers did not stop. Several times I had the same policeman pull up next to me, stop me, and fire away the exact questions he had asked the night before. Surely he knows by now I belong here, I thought, but I never said it. Something about the tone of the officers’ voices told me not to object too strongly.
The university should have been the one place where I was treated like everyone else, but it was not. Professors routinely ignored me in class when I tried to answer questions. On the rare occasions when they did recognize me, they often put down my answers with a very condescending tone. Other students made comments about me as I passed them in the hall or in the library. The first couple of times it happened, I passed it off as no big deal. When it kept happening, I decided something bigger was at play. It wasn’t just the white students who did this. African-American students also seemed to shun me. They would not talk to me or associate with me. I could not figure out why. This did not stop in Seattle. Several years later, during my fellowship in Pittsburgh, one day I walked into the office and discovered a note on my desk that read, “Why don’t you go back to the jungle where you belong.” This was not the America I had imagined.
After I had been in Seattle for several weeks, I went to the elderly woman from whom I rented the room. I often went to her for answers, like the time I purchased an item at the store for $2.99 but I had to pay more than three dollars. “Why did the store overcharge me?” I asked. She laughed and explained sales tax to me. This time I went to her and explained all I had experienced with the people at the local store, along with the way the police followed me and how people avoided me on the street. “Have I done something wrong?” I asked. “There must be some explanation for what has happened.”
The woman asked, “The people who crossed the street when they saw you coming—they were white, right?”
“Yes,” I said, unsure of what she was implying. “Why would that matter?”
She laughed a very loud laugh. “Oh, Bennet, welcome to your America.”
I had no idea what she was trying to say. “What are you talking about?” I asked.
&nb
sp; Rather than explain herself, she told me to go to the university library the next day and check out some history books that covered the American Civil War, as well as the civil rights movement. “Start with the Civil War,” she said.
“There was a civil war here?” I asked. This was the first I had ever heard of such a thing.
She laughed again. “Your understanding of America is so naively pure,” she said. “Yes, there was a civil war fought in the late nineteenth century, in large part over the question of slavery.”
Now I thought she had to be messing with me. “What are you talking about? Slavery? How could there be slavery in America, a country founded on freedom?”
“Read the books” was all she said in reply.
The next morning, I got up early and headed over to the university library. I checked out the books she’d recommended and devoured them quickly. I had no idea what to expect when I started reading. What I discovered that day and over the course of the next several days of reading was, to say the least, very disappointing, if not outright offensive. At first I became angry. Very angry. Then I felt betrayed. Finally, I just felt very, very disappointed. The place I thought God had blessed more than any nation on earth—the place where I believed people were intelligent and had learned to overcome the hatred and prejudice that had nearly destroyed my people back in Nigeria, this country I had put just one notch below heaven—was no different from any other place on earth. I had never heard of the practice of chattel slavery, where people were treated like animals, until I read about it in an American history book. Even the slavery of history, like that the Israelites suffered prior to the exodus, allowed slaves to maintain some shred of human dignity. Nor had I ever heard of racism until I experienced it firsthand and then read about its root causes.
By the time I finished reading that day, I was depressed. Not only was my image of America shattered, but my faith in the human race was shaken. If this is the real America, what hope is there? If people with such freedom, people who have been so blessed by God, have such a dark side, can any place be made perfect? In part, I had left Nigeria because I was so disappointed by the blind acceptance of injustices and how everyone seemed to go along with conditions and problems that no thinking person should ever accept. Now I found the same attitude in America concerning race.
But there was more to my frustration and anger and depression than simply losing faith in America. I now realized that many people I encountered from this point forward—casually, personally, and professionally—would prejudge me based on the color of my skin and the accent with which I speak. I was going to be marginalized for being a black man and for being an African immigrant. Moreover, I was expected to conform to the expectations of this society where I had to live my life at the mercy of another person’s conscience. If a police officer asked me thirty times what I was doing in a neighborhood, I had to smile and take it and answer politely. It was like living in postwar Nigeria all over again, reminiscent of how Igbos were treated like losers. Here the message was, “You are less because of the color of your skin—and you are much less because you are not an American.” I had refused to accept this attitude as a child. I had moved to America to get away from it. And now it was here, just as strong and just as evil.
Human beings frequently choose to deny or distort the truth for personal aggrandizement and financial gain, to attain some personal or group objective to the detriment of that common humanity we all share. And in so doing, they use other human beings as pawns. They attempt to define and diminish other people, telling them who and what they should be, where they can go, and how high they can climb. Such a way of life would no doubt rob me of who I am. I refused to become a victim of it and chose to stand firmly rooted in the symbol of who I am—my faith and the truth. Little did I know that this faith would be challenged and confronted by the culture of football and the NFL that was hiding in a nook further down the road of my American journey.
I did not leave the house for a couple days. I didn’t go to school. I didn’t do anything except sit in my small room on my very small bed and drink to numb the pain and frustration I felt.
When I finally had enough of feeling sorry for myself, the Spirit was able to break through and push me to do here what I had done in my native country. I decided I could not and would not allow myself to be defined by another person. Death would be preferable to such a fate. I made up my mind to never allow another human being created in the image of God to tell me, a child of God, what I could or could not do or where I could or could not go based on the amount of melanin in my skin. Am I not also created in God’s image? Is there not one God who created us all? There is not a white God or a black God or an American God or an African God. There is only one God, the creator of us all, before whom we all stand equal at His feet.
Nor would I allow anyone to dictate how intelligent I should be or to define and control my life or the opportunities available to me. They could not define my happiness or my joys. I refused that.
My resolution was soon put to the test.
• • • •
I returned to the university and did my best to focus on the program I had entered. Even though this was a one-year program, I had thoughts of entering the PhD program and making epidemiology my primary career focus. One day, I met one of the professors in the program for the first time. “Let me show you around,” he said. The two of us went to his research laboratory, where three doctoral students were hard at work. The professor interrupted their work and said, “Guys, I want to introduce you to Bennet Omalu from Nigeria. He thinks he can do what we do.” The three students then laughed a very sarcastic laugh.
Anger rose up inside of me, but it went away as quickly as it had come. Instead a thought came to me, a revelation as if a huge curtain had just been lifted from in front of me. These people are living a lie, I realized. The revelation came from God Himself. They are living a lie, I felt God say to me. They want you to believe you are inadequate and inferior, and they will do everything they can to feed this lie to you until you believe it yourself. But you are My child. My Spirit and My power reside within you. You are not less. Never let anyone tell you that you are.
This moment was a real turning point for me. Rather than allow myself to be sucked into a lie, I chose to pursue the light of truth. I went back to my father’s experience. This son of an orphan—an orphan who suffered abuse and marginalization all his life—was going to take the same path toward truth that my father took. My father went from a three-year-old living on the streets to a college-educated engineer through education, education, and education. All my life he told me, “Education is power, and knowledge is power. When you have knowledge, it is yours, and no one can take it away from you.” I left that laboratory and made up my mind to follow my father’s example. Education was going to be my path toward overcoming the lies that express themselves through prejudice and racism.
I threw myself into my studies, and not just in my academic field. I read everything I could lay my hands upon to help me understand American society. What I found greatly encouraged me. In fact, I became as excited as I had been downcast a few weeks earlier. I learned that opportunities for education are more abundant and easier to take advantage of here than in most parts of the world. As a fairly new arrival in the United States, I did not have any money, nor did I have social connections. But I discovered that if I was willing to work hard and apply myself, doors would open.
Now the only question I needed to answer was which path I should pursue. I already had a medical degree and had passed the USMLE, which made me eligible to enter an American residency program and pursue a career in medicine. But one of the reasons I entered the visiting scholar program in epidemiology related to cancer was to get away from the clinical side of medicine. I practiced medicine in Nigeria for four years and remained just as uncomfortable working with patients on my last day as I had been on my first. If I applied to the PhD program related to the program I was in at the
University of Washington, I would be accepted. As the initial year of study went by, I discovered that this program was not really me.
What, then, to study?
I didn’t have a lot of time to make up my mind. My initial visa was due to expire with the conclusion of the one-year visiting scholar program. I had to be accepted into a new program of study before that happened, or I would be on my way back to Nigeria. It took a miracle to get me to America the first time. I didn’t want to go back and have to have another miracle to bring me back.
Medicine remained my only real option, which meant I had to start applying to residency programs within the United States right away. Yet that raised another question: In what field should I specialize? I wanted to find a specialty that was as far away as possible from clinical medicine. The only two options I could see in 1994 were radiology and pathology. Radiology would still put me in contact with patients, but to a much lesser degree than other specialties. My research, however, found that very few doctors with medical degrees from outside the United States land radiology residency offers.
That left pathology as the only real path available to me if I were to pursue entering a medical residency program within the United States. To be honest, I was no more enthusiastic about entering a residency program in pathology than I had been in going to medical school at the age of sixteen. The process of elimination is a poor way to choose one’s career path. Therefore, I made a bargain with myself. I decided to apply to pathology programs, complete the five years of residency, and apply for fellowship training in whichever field of pathology I found I could best tolerate. After that, I would go on to law school. I could work as an attorney, perhaps focusing on personal injury, wrongful death, or medical malpractice cases. Spending the next five years studying to become a pathologist then looked like the perfect next step to achieving my ultimate goal.