Dr. Khama Ennis Is Reframing Representation In Medicine

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.

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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.

Why does the lack of representation in medicine go beyond a diversity conversation and become a life-or-death issue?

There is so much going on in this country right now. There are many things that we could be paying attention to, but I don’t want us to lose sight of the truly awful impact of health disparities, and the likelihood that Black women are going to be 3 or 4 times more likely to die bringing new life into this world than white women. And it’s not about education, it’s not about socioeconomics. I was more likely to die in giving birth to my two children than a white woman who’d finished high school only.

So, these are stories that have been with us for decades, that have been with us since the beginning of this country, and we can’t lose sight of it. The impact is real, both in lived experiences, and also it’s economical, too. It serves our country to have health equity and to make sure that we’re all getting the care that we need, and in all honesty, representation is a huge part of it. It makes a difference in outcomes, and it makes a difference when you have colleagues who don’t look like you, so that you can connect with them, and maybe treat the next person that looks like them differently than you may have otherwise.

Black women make up just 2.8% of physicians in the U.S. What does that statistic fail to capture about the emotional, professional, and psychological weight Black women carry in medicine?

There are so few of us in this space, and there’s also the fact that the statistic has barely shifted in the last couple of decades. When I was starting out, it was probably 2%. We haven’t made that much headway. For me, I was running the emergency department, and I was one of one. Patients get better treatment when there’s diversity in healthcare teams. I often felt like I had to be the person to bring awareness of health equity to the system that I was working in, because it mattered to me for the patients that I was seeing. It matters to me and my family.

This is real. There’s this invisible tax of being the only person in a space and feeling like you’re always the person raising this issue. And you’re doing it in isolation, right? There’s not other people necessarily around, or if there are, there may be one or two. So, you feel very isolated with this extra burden that is in addition to the work of medicine, which is not easy, and it’s not getting any easier in this country.

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What was the moment that pushed you from simply living these experiences to deciding the world needed to hear them in Faces of Medicine?

I was working in the emergency department, and I needed to make a shift for so many reasons. Emergency medicine is wonderful, but it is not good for a person’s sleep. There were lots of things that were going on in my life, and it was time for me to shift gears, and I kept putting off that transition out of the emergency department because of being the only one. I woke up one day and said, the solution isn’t me staying here forever and running myself into the ground. I need to create the space for myself to find my own new path to practice medicine and care for people, but also a different way to share this pathway with people who may not know that it’s accessible.

At first, I was going to write a memoir, tell the story of my journey. But to really be able to move the needle, I decided to collect stories from all different perspectives. I wanted to tell the stories of people who are first-generation college graduates, second-generation physicians, people from the East Coast, the West Coast, and in the middle. People from different specialties, people who grew up with 200 years of ancestry in the Deep South, and people like me who are immigrants to this country. And one of the docs who’s going to be profiled, when she first came to this country, there was a portion of her life where she was undocumented. Still here providing medical service, now with all the papers in place. People don’t know that you can have a family that has been damn-near homeless and become a physician. People don’t know that you can take the MCAT three times and become a physician. The path is different for everybody; that is what I really wanted to show.

How do you think about legacy, both the one Black women physicians inherit, and the one they’re actively building?

I want to go back to the story of Rebecca Lee Crumpler, who was the very first Black woman physician to graduate with an MD in this country, whose name I had not heard until the last five years, not long before I started this project. I want us to recognize that legacy. She got her education at a medical school in Boston, and she was the one Black woman to ever graduate from it. So, I want to honor her legacy because that opened the way. I want to honor the legacies that we’ve all created.

When we go through our day-to-day, we don’t realize how big this is, to be in this space. It is not statistically rational that I would be in this position right now at all. I want to honor the women who have done this work, and I want to open the doors for the next generation. As Dr. Thea James said, we reach back and pull forward. You never just stop with where you are. You open the doors, you pave the way, and you make sure that you can bring the next one up, because that’s the only way that we actually shift culture and make it better for all of us.

Why is mission-driven, donor-funded storytelling one of the most powerful tools available for building the pipeline and driving systemic change in healthcare?

This type of work reflects what is truly needed and what is valued. I’m not beholden to corporations in this work. I’m not beholden to anybody that has an agenda. The agenda of this is extremely clear and pure. I want to improve health equity. I want to increase representation in medicine. I don’t have big donors. This is people supporting this work with $25 donations, $100 donations; this is how this is getting done. Nobody’s pulling the strings. This is me. This is these women sharing their stories, and us bringing them to light. I’m not making money off of this.

When you can tell a story that is just my heart to your heart, my life to your life, it makes it more real, it makes it more tangible, and it makes it so much more accessible. There are people I want to reach and say, come on, sis, let’s do this. Please come and replace me. And it’s also people who just don’t have Black women physicians in their lives, who just assume that there’s one easy pathway that we’ve all gone through. No. We are real people. We have real things to work through and real families to live with, and real people to thank for helping us get to where we are.

What do you hope Faces of Medicine ultimately sparks inside hospitals, medical schools, and the broader healthcare system?

I just want to spark a conversation. I want people to look around, and if they’ve got people who are representing the communities that we serve around them, then how do you retain them? Are you honoring the people that you’re working shoulder to shoulder with right now, or are you creating undue burdens for them that are making it harder for them to stay? The burnout rates for Black women physicians are higher than for other physicians because of the additional work that we have to do, that is, quite frankly, unpaid labor. We’re not the only underrepresented group in medicine. Black men are at about a similar percentage, 2.7 to 2.8%. Latino, Latina, and Indigenous physicians, we’re all underrepresented. So, I would love it if there was further expansion to tell the stories of other underrepresented physicians, because that is one of the ways that we need to shift gears in order to improve health equity.

Faces of Medicine is available to stream on Kinema.com. The podcast is available on all major platforms. To support the work or participate as a physician, visit facesofmedicine.org. All donations are tax-deductible through fiscal sponsor Fractured Atlas. Follow the project on Instagram and Facebook, and connect with Dr. Ennis directly on LinkedIn.

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