Chidiebere Ibe, a Nigerian medical student, and aspiring neurosurgeon, noticed a theme every time he flipped open his medical school textbooks: Most of the illustrations were of people with white skin only. Nothing else. As a result, he grabbed a pencil and began creating drawings that represented Black people, according to Artnet News.
As the old folk say: we make a way out of no way. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, there have been young Black people who have used the time to create something in a space where Black people do not feel represented, such as the nine-year-old Black boy who started a doll business or the TikTok artist who created digital brushes for Black hair.
Ibe was no different. He taught himself to draw during the height of the pandemic, when everyone was locked down in their homes, according to Artnet news.
Now, Ibe shares his illustrations through his Instagram and Twitter. His most popular illustration has been of a Black woman and her brown fetus, which has now been liked more than 88,000 times.
From Artnet News:
“Textbooks are essential to medical training,” Ibe wrote on YouTube. “They walk medical trainees through conditions they will encounter during their practice. The skin is an important organ that protects us and can signal when something is wrong in our body. Yet, most medical illustrations are on the Caucasian skin. This lack of diversity has important implications for medical trainees and their future patients because many conditions and signs look different based on the patient’s skin color.”
“It’s not a norm for the physician to care properly” for Black people, Ibe told Artnet News, noting that the lack of understanding of how diseases can appear for Black patients can lead to “mortality, childbirth pains, wrong diagnosis, [and] communication problems.”
I’m going to be honest. This is something I did not even think of as an issue, which says a lot about how we, even people of color, are conditioned to normalize whiteness. But representation is important in all fields, especially the medical field where there is a whole lot of distrust.