A dean of admissions at a Memphis higher education school recently told me, “We are no longer allowed to look at a photograph of a prospective student.”

I practice medicine in a place where human stories walk into exam rooms long before the symptoms do. When a young Black woman sits before me, I’m acutely aware that there are entire dimensions of her lived experience that I’ll never fully know.

Not because I don’t care, but because I haven’t even remotely lived her life. I haven’t navigated the same systems, carried the same burdens, or made the same quiet calculations that shape how she moves through the world.

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