Recently, someone asked me a question that caught me off guard: "Does discrimination even still exist?"
They weren't being malicious. They genuinely wanted to understand. And that question is exactly why I'm writing this.
Because if you've never had to wonder whether discrimination still exists, that in itself is the answer. The fact that it's even a question reveals how invisible these experiences remain for the people who don't live them. And that invisibility is the problem. Not because anyone is choosing to look away, but because the systems that harm certain people were designed to be invisible to everyone else.
But sometimes, discrimination happens in plain sight. On the sixth day of Black History Month, the President of the United States posted a racist image depicting former President and First Lady Obama as apes. Twelve hours later, it was deleted. And the world moved on.
But I didn't.
In 2026, watching the leader of our country share a stereotype with such a vile historical legacy, one used for centuries to strip Black people of our humanity, triggered a fear Black and Brown people carry every single day. As a mother, my first thought was for my girls: What does this give people permission to do? How would they hear about this image? What would it mean for them to know that hateful imagery depicting Black people as animals was shared by the President, and that their skin color, their mom's skin color, was being associated with an ape?
The silence that followed was deafening. And telling.
If you saw that image and felt uncomfortable but said nothing, I understand. It is hard to know what to say. But your silence told your Black coworker, your child's Black teacher, your Black neighbor, something about where they stand with you. Not because you intended harm, but because in the absence of words, people fill in the blank. And for those of us who have spent a lifetime filling in that blank, silence almost always means the same thing.
What keeps me up at night is knowing that image doesn't just live on social media. It seeps into classrooms, shaping how children see each other. It influences how people think when they encounter someone who looks like me: their Black neighbor, their Black doctor, their Black colleague. It reinforces stereotypes that determine who gets believed, who gets hired, who gets proper medical care, and who gets to walk through the world without carrying the weight of someone else's hate.
We saw this play out in the outrage over Ariel from The Little Mermaid being portrayed as Black, or in the recent backlash when Lupita Nyong'o was cast in The Odyssey, with people asking, "How could those characters be Black?" The question underneath is always the same: Black people couldn't possibly be something beautiful, renowned, respectable, special. And when those associations are embedded deeply enough, they follow us everywhere, including into the exam room.
This is where racism and health collide.
There is a concept in medicine called weathering. It describes what happens when your body physically breaks down from the chronic stress of navigating bias, discrimination, and systemic racism. Black women are diagnosed with conditions like fibroids, diabetes, and heart disease earlier in life, and our outcomes are worse because our bodies have been under stress longer. Our bodies age faster. Our hearts fail sooner. Our pregnancies are riskier.
That dehumanizing image posted by the President? That's weathering too — the cumulative toll of being told, again and again, that your life matters less.
When healthcare providers have spent years absorbing portrayals of Black people as drug-seeking, as having higher pain tolerances, as exaggerating symptoms, those associations don't disappear when we walk into an exam room. Studies show Black patients receive less pain medication than white patients for the same conditions. The connection between that dehumanizing image and health policy is not abstract.
The imagery and stereotypes people are exposed to shape real medical decisions with real consequences.
For decades, medical research defaulted to studying men and applying those findings to everyone else. That approach created dangerous knowledge gaps that cost women's lives. We didn't know that heart attacks present differently in women. While men clutch their chests, women often experience nausea, jaw pain, and fatigue. We didn't know that certain medications metabolize differently in women's bodies. Women died because the medical system treated their bodies as smaller versions of men's bodies instead of studying their distinctions.
Now imagine that erasure compounded by race.
A 2017 JAMA study found that white women have significantly lower risks for developing diabetes than Black women. We are more likely to die from breast cancer despite lower incidence rates, because we're diagnosed later and treated less aggressively. Black maternal mortality is three times higher than white maternal mortality. Our babies die at more than twice the rate of white babies. These are not coincidences. These are patterns that only become visible when you study the populations most affected.
The same research infrastructure that finally took women's health seriously is now under threat. Recently, government officials have testified that, to properly examine health disparities, we should examine everyone equally rather than focus on specific racial or ethnic groups. NIH director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya argued that studying structural racism in health is “ideological" and "unscientific," and claims we should examine everyone equally. It sounds fair. It sounds like equality. But we already tried that approach. It's the one that killed women from unrecognized heart attacks for decades. You can’t identify disparities without comparing how disease affects different populations.
When leaders promote imagery that strips us of our humanity, when officials testify that we should not study specific populations, when people question whether discrimination even exists, it all feeds the same system that allows health disparities to persist unchallenged.
Health equity is not achieved by pretending we are all the same. It is achieved by acknowledging our differences, studying them rigorously, and addressing the barriers that put certain communities at higher risk.
When we erase identity from health research, we don't eliminate discrimination. We just eliminate our ability to fight it.
In 2026, with everything we know about health disparities, with all the evidence showing that Black and Brown communities and women are dying at preventably higher rates, silence and erasure are choices.
I refuse to be silent. And I refuse to let this work be erased. Because the lives depending on this research? They're not statistics. They're my patients. My neighbors. My daughters.
They're me.
