Black Dentists

102 Black dentists listed nationwide, 0 offering telehealth. Every listing self-identified; 27 license-checked.

A dentist looks after teeth, gums and the soft tissue of the mouth. That means check-ups and cleanings, fillings, root canals, extractions, crowns, gum disease, mouth ulcers that will not heal, and screening for oral cancer.

Go for a check-up on the schedule your dentist sets, usually somewhere between every six and every twelve months. Go sooner for a tooth that hurts when you bite or wakes you at night, gums that bleed every time you brush, a tooth that has loosened, or a sore or a patch inside the mouth that has lasted more than two weeks. Swelling of the face or jaw with a fever is not an appointment to book next week, it is urgent care today.

Bring your medicines, because a long list of them dry the mouth and change what happens to your teeth. Bring recent x-rays if you are changing practice. Ask what a visit costs before the chair goes back, and ask what the plan is if the cheaper option does not hold.

The evidence for concordant care

Black dentists are 3.9 percent of the United States dentist workforce on 2024 figures from the American Dental Association's Health Policy Institute, where 67.0 percent of dentists are white and 20.4 percent are Asian [1].

The gap in mouths is wider than the gap in dentists, and it is a specific kind of gap. In national survey data for 2017 to March 2020, 30.3 percent of non-Hispanic Black adults aged 20 to 64 had untreated tooth decay, against 18.3 percent of non-Hispanic white adults [2]. Lifetime decay experience was slightly lower in Black adults, an average of 8.2 affected teeth against 8.8 [2]. Read the two numbers together and the difference is not in how many teeth decay. It is in how many get fixed.

Where Black dentists practice matters for that. A study in Health Affairs found that dentists from underrepresented minority groups cluster in counties with larger minority populations, averaging 31.1 percent underrepresented minority residents against 18.5 percent in counties with none, and that the share of their patients racially concordant with them ran 2.6 times greater than that group's share of the surrounding population [3]. The same study estimated that parity would require roughly 19,714 additional Black dentists [3].

So the workforce figure is not an abstraction. A small number of dentists carry a disproportionate share of Black patients, and a shortage of them turns up in the mouth as decay that was found and never filled.