I used the #SHUTDOWNSTEM strike for black lives to reflect on racism in academia, our reactions and what we CAN do.
If you’re like me, when you read the headlines about George Floyd, you did not want to know more. It drags you down: one more case of a black person dying for no reason in the news, and the sad helplessness that comes with it.
If you are like me, you did not feel moved by the kind words of many leaders and organizations in the aftermath of the social uproar that followed the brutal murder. They are nice clean polished words but the commitment comes and goes, and soon everything will be forgotten.
What does the death of George Floyd and all the others mean for us at this university, in this laboratory? What does it mean to a privileged white physicist whom has not felt the need to prove their humanity?
This is not happening here
One of the most common reactions scientists have is denial: we develop arguments to minimize situations and to convince ourselves that this is not our problem. We have plenty of research problems to tackle, and it is fine to just continue along our track. But the doubt must be raised: what is the point when you break and say no more? why continue along our track and produce knowledge that feeds an ugly, unjust, terrorizing world?
The first step to every problem is recognizing the problem: we must understand how different our experiences are from those of black people. Every single black student/postdoc/faculty that I have come to know in the last few years have had encounters with the police for apparently no reason. And here is how the story goes: a white person feels a possible threat and calls the police. The police, knowing the possible threat, have the implacable strategy of instigating fear in the black community through violence. And the situation escalates out of control. There is no escape for the black person. They know they could the next Floyd.
How many times have we been questioned by the police for sitting in a corner of the law building having a sandwich at lunchtime? for standing outside the physics building waiting for a friend? for taking a walk in some nearby neighborhood? or for leaving our office at night? Each one of these happened to a black scientist on our campus. This is the living reality of black folks..
Black people spend a lot of awake time worrying about keeping their bodies safe. Don’t fool yourselves: that fear is part of the experiences of our black students, our black postdocs and our black faculty. And whilst this primary fear is shaping behavior and academic performance, there is a constant flow of micro-aggressions and systemic biases adding to the fire. It is not easy to fully comprehend this while white, but we must try.
There is nothing i can do
The second most common reaction that we tend to have is powerlessness. Once we understand the gravity of the problem, it is easy to feel overwhelmed and believe there is nothing we can do. It turns out that the solution to this problem starts exactly when people not affected by this drama DO something about it!
The other day I was listening to a podcast where the historian Ibram Kendi talked about how to be an anti-racist. The point he made is that there is no in-between. At every moment we implicitly or explicitly pick a side: either racist or anti-racist. It is not only in racial slurs or the brutalization of black bodies that we act in a racist manner. Being witnesses to the injustice without intervening puts us also on the wrong side of the line because we are perpetuating the system.
At every moment we implicitly or explicitly pick a side: either racist or anti-racist.
Being anti-racist requires that we actively work against it, by for example walking up to the police officer when we see him approach the black student in front of the building, or calling out the colleague that associates poor performance with lack of talent, unwilling to understand the other challenges black students face. The social issues we are gasping with stem from our white association of black with bad. Being anti-racist means working towards breaking that association. Being racist is allowing it to continue.
Enough talk... it's time for action!
I encourage you all to read the AIP TEAM-UP Report “The Time is now: systematic changes to increase African Americans with Bachelor’s Degrees in Physics and Astronomy”. The bottom line is clear: Faculty have an important role to play! Of the 6 essential factors that TEAM-UP identified, each one of us has the power individually to act on three: the sense of belonging, physics identity and academic support. By getting to know the black students and postdocs around us, and taking the extra step to bring them into our community, we can transform their experience. By encouraging them and recognizing their abilities, we can strengthen their physics identity. By leaving behind the deficit thinking in teaching and building instead a teaching philosophy based on their strengths, we can provide the academic support they need to strive. This report states that only departments where a large fraction of the faculty are fully engaged in this work do well, as opposed to departments where a lone champion is taking on the diversity role. Ultimately we must have the hard conversations as a unit and invest in the long-term cultural change