Average Black Surgeon is a lived memoir of becoming, enduring, and choosing. From childhood and identity to surgical training, bias, resilience, and visibility, it traces how discipline, community, and self-belief are forged under pressure. Honest, reflective, and ongoing, it explores the cost of excellence, the responsibility of representation, and the quiet decisions that shape a surgeon’s life—and legacy.
Average Black Surgeon
Confidence built on repeated proof looks identical to arrogance from the outside — until pressure arrives. Only one of them survives it. A chapter about evidence, doubt, and learning who gets to define you.
Average Black Surgeon
The day before the world shut down, I laughed at a man wearing a gas mask in a crowded station. Within days, he no longer looked ridiculous — he looked early.
Average Black Surgeon
I was thirteen, back in Ghana, and I walked past a teacher. We nodded. We kept walking. We were caned. The rule we'd broken didn't exist anywhere we'd been before — and that was precisely the point.
Average Black Surgeon
I had done everything asked of me. Written papers. Practiced until my answers had no edges. Still, I wasn't breaking through. Then, the week before my interviews, I got into the water.
Average Black Surgeon
I was a medical student with lesions I didn't recognise. The textbooks had no images of skin like mine. So I did the only thing left — I called my mother in Ghana.
Average Black Surgeon
After my exams, I thought I was ready. Then I watched a master do the same operation in a third of the time. No rush. No drama. Just something I hadn't yet earned.
Average Black Surgeon
I was asked to consider the biggest role available. I chose the smaller one instead. Not from fear — from knowing exactly where my leadership would actually mean something.
Average Black Surgeon
He was fifteen years older, calm, conservative in theatre. I assumed the half marathon was mine. He crossed the finish line well ahead of me and barely looked like he'd tried.
Average Black Surgeon
I opened the assessment and saw zero. Not a low score. Not borderline. Zero. Across every domain. As if everything I had done in that theatre didn't exist.
Average Black Surgeon
The approach that got me through training failed me completely in the exam room. Same knowledge. Different room. I had to learn a second language nobody teaches you.
Average Black Surgeon
The panel told me I wasn't ready to sit my exam. That same term, I sat in a lecture theatre and heard my own work being taught to the room. Nobody knew I was there.
Average Black Surgeon
I chose surgery on a quiet night in a doctors' mess, based on thirty minutes of calm and one honest conversation. The information was incomplete. The commitment was not.
The views expressed here are my own and do not represent the views of my employer or any affiliated organisation.