For an ethnomedicine enriched by human diversity

Abstract

Dear Editor, I began my school life in a white institution thanks to the good socio-economic status achieved by my parents after years of hard working. At the school, I was always the only black girl in the classroom. For this reason, at the age of 6-years, I became aware of the perverse racism presented in our society.However, in my multiethnic and multiracial family environment I was gifted with loving relationships and mutual commitment. For this reason, I developed mechanisms to sustains my ideal of healthy interethnic and interracial relationships.My dual ethnical background (white Christian and black Yoruba) and my dual nationality (Brazil-Nigeria) determined my personal, educational and professional paths. In addition, these were responsible for my entering in medical school at the age of 18, without ever questioning whether that was my place. As a black woman, I occupied and continue to occupy this space under questioning eyes related to my deservingness to be there, intellectual capacity, and under frequent microaggressions from colleagues, professors, and users of the health systems.In the history of Brazil, serious misconceptions, which reduce a human condition to legal condition, were provoked by the synonym between "black" and "slave". This misunderstanding was fed by researchers who rely on sources produced by foreigners incapable of discriminating between the conditions of enslaved and freed blacks. (1) Since the 1980s, new approaches in the historiography of slavery have made possible more accurate analyses of the Brazilian slave process, which was not enough, however, to overcome the reductionism of the history of blacks to the history of slavery.The notion of race functions from two basic and complementary registers: the biological and the ethno-cultural. (2) The latter, associated with tradictions, religion and geographical origin that make up the socalled "cultural racism". (3) The action of racism is perverse and shows how negatively stereotyped representations of Africans, African descendants, and their religions are related. (4) The psychosocial effects of racism shape behaviors, thoughts and feelings, on the basis of which discriminators and discriminated are differentiated. The victims, transformed into defendants, and solely responsibles for the suffering imposed on them, are conditioned to feel inferior or subhuman. The damage to psychological health includes anguish, panic, anxiety, insecurity, guilt, self-censorship, rigidity, loneliness, chemical dependencies, and syndromes. The promotion of equity, inclusion and recovery include factors related to socioeconomic and educational indices, and processes of reconstruction of subjectivities. (5) How to cite this article: Salami AO. For an ethnomedicine enriched by human diversity. einstein (São Paulo). 2022;20:eCE6083.