Black Women Make Up Just 2.8% Of U.S. Doctors — Faces of Medicine’ Founder Dr. Khama Ennis Is Working to Change That [Exclusive]

Dr. Khama Ennis, creator of 'Faces of Medicine,' explains why Black women make up only 2.8% of U.S. physicians and the cost of that absence. The post Black Women Make Up Just 2.8% Of U.S. Doctors — Faces of Medicine’ Founder Dr. Khama Ennis Is Working to Change That [Exclusive] appeared first on MadameNoire.

Apr 25, 2026 - 01:34

Black Women Make Up Just 2.8% Of U.S. Doctors — Faces of Medicine’ Founder Dr. Khama Ennis Is Working to Change That [Exclusive]

Dr. Khama Ennis — Source: Photos Provided by KFrance Insight / KFrance Insight

There are moments in a career when a professional title is no longer enough to contain the full weight of what someone is called to do. For Dr. Khama Ennis, that moment came quietly, not in the chaos of an emergency department, but in the realization that spending years as one of the only Black women in the room was not a personal inconvenience. It was a systemic emergency.

An emergency physician and former chief of emergency medicine, Dr. Ennis channeled that recognition into Faces of Medicine, an award-winning documentary series and podcast that pulls back the curtain on the real lives of Black women physicians, not their degrees, but their detours, their doubts, and the doors they had to break through to get where they are. Now, in its second season, the project has earned multiple Telly Awards for social impact and advocacy, and its creator is only getting more focused. In a candid conversation with MadameNoire, Dr. Ennis explains why representation in medicine is not simply a diversity talking point; it is a matter of who lives and who dies.

MadameNoire: **How did the absence of representation in your own medical journey become the foundation for Faces of Medicine?**

Dr. Khama Ennis: I had tunnel vision, and I just knew from a young age that I wanted to be a doctor, so I didn’t actually explore to figure out how many more people like me were in medicine. I realized it was my last year of medical school, the first time I ever met a Black woman doctor. And then later on in my career, many years in, I’m realizing I’m one of two Black women in the entire hospital that I was at. I needed to make a shift personally, my career shift, and I thought I couldn’t do it, because there was only one other person.

I didn’t want to change or reduce the possibility of patients ever being able to see a Black woman physician, and then I realized that that wasn’t really up to me as a single-handed individual to do. But, if I could create something that could bring more people into the field, we’re only 2.8% of doctors, and that is not nearly enough, I would do it. So that’s how this project was born, to try to show people who look like me, who look like us, ourselves in medicine, so that we know what’s possible. That is our story, too.