Use photos of Black doctors and patients to heal not hurt

You are right to draw attention to the problem of the under-representation of Black scientists in pictures (see Nature 595, 626; 2021). In the medical sphere, photos of people of colour are not deployed equitably.

For example, I’m struck by how health organizations’ promotional websites in the United States and Canada frequently use photos of Black people to illustrate poor health, but pictures of white people to show vitality or to incite sympathy around a cause. Moreover, in such images, doctors are almost always white men. This repeated visual association of poor health with Black bodies — often the patient, rarely the expert — perpetuates dangerous stereotypes, when the real health risk is structural racism (see Nature 592, 674–680; 2021).

At the same time, pictures of patients of colour can be missing where they are crucial. UK medical student Malone Mukwende was so dismayed at the lack of imagery on how to diagnose clinical symptoms on darker skin tones in his textbooks, that he wrote the 2020 handbook Mind the Gap and launched a website to share more diverse examples (go.nature.com/2wlx6g6).

What to do? Appreciate the damage caused by overuse and underuse of photos. Complain about both. And use images more intentionally: to educate, not to perpetuate inequality. They are powerful.