Angelina Jolie is a lot of things: an actor, a filmmaker, and a humanitarian.
And now she's working to expose racist structures in the healthcare industry.
In a new article for Time, Angelina interviewed Malone Mukwende, a medical student dedicated to educating others about racial biases in his field.
"When Malone Mukwende, 21, started medical school in London, he identified a fundamental problem: Almost all the images and data used in its teaching were based on studies of white patients," she writes.
"But medical symptoms can present very differently on Black and brown skin, leading to misdiagnosis, suffering, and even death," she continued. "Still a student, he has recently launched both a handbook, Mind the Gap, and Hutano, a new online platform intended to empower people with knowledge about their health."
In the conversation, Angelina revealed that she's noticed medical racism through her children.
"I have children from different backgrounds, and I know when there was a rash that everybody got, it looked drastically different depending on their skin color. But whenever I looked at medical charts, the reference point was always white skin," she said.
"Recently my daughter Zahara, whom I adopted from Ethiopia, had surgery, and afterward a nurse told me to call them if her skin 'turned pink,'" she continued.
Malone replied, "Almost the entirety of medicine is taught in that way. There’s a language and a culture that exists in the medical profession, because it’s been done for so many years, and because we are still doing it so many years later it doesn’t seem like it’s a problem."
"However, like you’ve just illustrated, that’s a very problematic statement for some groups of the population because it’s just not going to happen in that way, and if you’re unaware you probably won’t call the doctor," he said.
They also discuss the fact that "this goes beyond just looking at skin": covering the fact that there "haven’t been studies on Black and brown skin because it wasn’t considered important," as Angelina points out.
