Learn more about the comprehensive -- and evolving -- document, intended to guide individuals struggling to convince their department or company to care about anti-racism initiatives.
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PICTURED HERE: SOME OF THE TEAM MEMBERS INVOLVED IN THE 'RESPONSES TO 10 COMMON CRITICISMS OF ANTI-RACISM ACTION IN STEM.' FROM LEFT TO RIGHT (TOP): CLAIRE WILLIAMS, DR. JAMES QUINN, MARKIA SMITH, ZEENA M.G. RIVERA. (BOTTOM): MAYA GOSZTYLA, NAVINA LOTAY, KAREN TANG, AARYA VENKAT.
On June 10, academics, professionals, and institutions participated in #ShutDownSTEM and #ShutDownAcademia — a social media campaign designed to shine a light on racial injustice. The initiative was intended to serve as a day of education and awareness, outlining the outright and subtle forms of bias that minorities in STEM face, while educating the public on ways to combat anti-Black racism.
Some of the industry’s biggest players participated, including Nature. On June 9, the publication sent out a tweet promoting the event. While it generally received support, a portion of the comments appear to question, or outright disagree, with Nature’s endorsement of an event in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“You are a respected journal. PLEASE do not become a showboat for political fads, no matter how well-meaning they may be,” one commenter wrote.
“Let’s look at the upside; anyone who doesn’t publish with you can now consider themselves lucky and untainted. Get back to science and leave politics out of it,” wrote another.
While this may be indicative of a small sample of the population, for Maya Gosztyla, a Ph.D. student in the Biomedical Sciences program at UC San Diego, the comments echoed the resistance she’d witnessed in academia in response to other diversity initiatives.
That’s when she decided to do something about it.
“I thought it might be useful to compile some responses to these statements so that I wouldn’t waste so much time typing the same replies over and over,” she says.
“As the document grew, I realized it could be useful for others too, so I decided to bring some more people on board to help.”
Maya connected with Lydia Kwong, Naomi Murray, and Claire Williams and spent several weeks researching and writing an essay intended to serve as a roadmap for addressing resistance to diversity and inclusion work in academia.
“Since the four of us are not Black or members of any underrepresented minority, we felt it was important for the essay to receive feedback from a diverse panel of reviewers,” Maya says.
“We reached out to people we knew in person and also sent out a call for reviewers on Twitter. Fifteen reviewers joined our team. One-third of the reviewers identify as Black, and nearly three-quarters of them are members of underrepresented minorities in STEM. The reviewers provided extremely insightful feedback on our first draft of the essay. We rewrote large portions of the text and added several new pages of material. The revised draft was greatly improved, thanks to the reviewers’ comments.”
The publication of the essay, titled “Responses to 10 Common Criticisms of Anti-Racism Action in STEM” was announced on August 10, along with a supplementary website offering additional resources.
It is a comprehensive — and evolving — document, intended to guide individuals struggling to convince their department or company to care about anti-racism initiatives.
“Since publication, the essay has been retweeted hundreds of times on Twitter,” Maya says.
“The website has received nearly 6,000 visitors from around the world, in addition to nearly 3,000 PDF downloads. Several faculty, including the President of Howard Hughes Medical Institute, have told us they plan to implement the essay into their coursework or diversity training.”
The team says it will now work to improve the essay and issue a revised version, based on additional feedback from readers.
“Since all of the authors and reviewers are from STEM backgrounds, we hope to add a few experts in critical race theory or diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to our reviewer panel. It is important to us that our document does not stop at encouraging conversations in DEI but emphasizes the need for measurable, actionable change in STEM fields and departments.”
Here’s more on the importance of the essay, from some of the authors and reviewers.
[ALT description: Each slide features a photo of a team member, alongside their titles and quotes. For a text version of the graphics, please click here.]
