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The study of human genetics emerged from a deep curiosity of our human inheritance that was firmly rooted in white supremacy. Francis Galton, one of the fathers of human genetics, who coined the term "eugenics," published Hereditary Genius (in which he asserted the genetic "superiority" of the upper classes) in 1869, 35 years after Great Britain ended slavery in British-held colonies and a mere four years after the United States emancipated enslaved African Americans. It is easy to contextualize Galton's belief in his own superiority. It sprang from age-old hegemonic social structures that protected his power and privilege while preventing others (e.g., women, people of color, the poor) from accessing opportunities in the academy and beyond. Academic science (as opposed to science writ large, which has always been the domain of innovative laborers, caregivers and land stewards) was kept in the hands of a privileged few who believed it to be not only their social right but also their innate right.

Combined with Mendelian determinism, which was wildly popular in the U.S. in the early 20th century, Galton's worldview set the stage for organized efforts of American eugenicists and segregationists. Eugenicists worked to link genetics to race, codifying into scientific circles the false notion of "genetic races." Eugenics was not a fringe idea; it was solidly mainstream with broad reach and significant impacts on public opinion, federal immigration policy, Supreme Court decisions and various state legislative policies in the United States and in Europe. The U.S. Eugenics Record Office (ERO) led the way in crafting public policy aimed at disenfranchising racial minorities, immigrants and poor white populations.

Some of the more notable policies directly written or heavily influenced by the ERO included the Virginia Racial Integrity Act and the Eugenical Sterilization Act, passed on the same day in 1924. American sterilization laws, written with the aid of prominent American members of the scientific community, became the blueprint for the sterilization laws and practices of the Nazi regime. The ERO shuttered its doors in 1939, but its legacy is still felt today. Indeed, the involuntary sterilization of incarcerated people, which continues to occur in the 21st century, is a civil rights abuse inspired by eugenics.

How do we teach and talk about this incredibly problematic history? Despite the many scholarly texts available, there is rarely an open and frank acknowledgement that the very foundations of our field were rooted in the false and dangerous beliefs of biological race and human racial hierarchies. Today, there is an effort to distance modern genetics from the harms of eugenics. This shameful aspect of our shared history is often separated from the primary curriculum for human genetics trainees, relegated to classes in "ELSI" (ethical, legal and social issues), which are usually electives-or, worse, just one day of training. In large part, we are failing to disclose this startling racist legacy to young scientists entering the field; a sad irony for a discipline devoted to human inheritance. Our failure to acknowledge the racist origins of modern genetics also has repercussions in our (in)ability to attract and retain members of underrepresented communities in genetics and other STEM training programs. Thus, as time marches on, the knowledge of our harmful racist history is fading while the culture of whiteness continues to dominate.

Today, the white perspective threatens to turn precision medicine into a tool for structural violence, again. Most of the large-scale genomewide association studies (GWAS) of complex chronic disease have been performed in white European-descent populations. This practice is now widely acknowledged as problematic. Nevertheless, results from available Eurocentric GWAS are now demonstrate promising clinical utility-in individuals of European descent. Poor transancestry performance and predictive utility of genetic scores is a well-known problem with a straightforward explanation.

While the underlying biology of complex disease is largely shared across human populations, allele frequencies and linkage-disequilibrium structures tagging the contributory genes differ as a consequence of different demographic histories. This results in genetic tests and scores that do not translate well across populations. There are various statistical approaches under development to improve the transancestry portability of genetic score information, but it is entirely possible that the problem will not be fundamentally solved until global inclusion in genetic studies is standard.

When we identify white supremacy as the paramount problem in our field's history, it becomes clear that it is still our problem today. Lack of diversity in available genetic data is not an accident; it is an inevitable consequence of systemic racism in biomedical research. The difficulty in recruiting non-European populations into genetic research today is a direct result of our history of white centering, gatekeeping by white academics and decades of human rights abuses suffered at the hands of white researchers. White centering is still so embedded in human genetics that even though we recognize these problems, millions of dollars are being invested in programs to capitalize on Eurocentric genetic scores and tests that are primarily effective for people of European descent, potentially leaving communities of color behind in precision medicine advancements.

It is true that, in medicine, we often have to accept the reality that only a proportion of people may be helped with any given treatment or prevention strategy. Of course, there are treatments and diagnostic tools that are less effective or ineffective for some people. This may be tolerable when the ineffectiveness is random. However, when the ineffectiveness is random-when the ineffectiveness in fact targets only a certain demographic that is already experiencing grave health disparities-is this tolerable? Are we not in fact creating harm by allowing greater inequity to impact already disadvantaged groups? The first principle of medicine is "do no harm"; it is not "do no harm to white people."

It was difficult to admit to myself the role that I have played in the creation of these equity problems by failing to consider the nonwhite perspective. In this moment, we are presented with an opportunity to adopt a true culture change-one of antiracism-in the field of human genetics. To embrace this opportunity, we must shift in our thinking about how racism manifests in science. Specifically, it's time to turn our attention to the problem of racist in science. When we appreciate that systemic racism is not a problem of certain individuals, but rather a problem of ideas (many of which were popularized by eugenicists), we become more aware of its vast scope. Even if we are not to blame for these ideas, as members of the human genetics field, we can take responsibility for them. We have inherited their consequences and if we do not empower ourselves to challenge the legacy of our field, who will?

For example, human geneticists of today are perfectly positioned to push back on the myth that race has any basis in biology, a myth that was ingrained by the flawed forefathers of our field. Some modern day geneticists are already devoted to this work. Others routinely, if naïvely, perpetuate the scientifically inappropriate conflation of race and ancestry. The trouble is that most human geneticists know very little about race. Scholars in sociology, anthropology, critical race theory, gender studies, etc. who have a far more sophisticated understanding of the origins of race and racism, have so much to teach us.

Human genetics is not strictly a biological science, it is also a social science, and we ignore other social sciences to our peril. Through their scholarship we stand to gain deeper insight into our own science. Can we humble ourselves enough to learn from those outside our field? Together, could we dispel the myth of biological race? Again, we cannot do this alone, as most of us are ill-equipped to confront the rhetorical science misinformation bombarding society on a daily basis. Engaging experts in strategic science communication, along-side of social scientists and geneticists, is mission critical to meaningfully de-biologizing race.

Human genetics is a science that I love, a science to which I have devoted my life, and a science that I believe could be a powerful force against racist ideas in medicine and society. But this potential can only be reached if we are willing to reckon with our role, collectively and individually, past and present, in upholding white supremacy and structural violence in science and academia. As educator and author Catrice M. Jackson has observed, "If you don't have an antiracism plan, you plan to be racist."

An antiracism plan will require challenging everything from the speed to the priorities of human genetics research, but if we are serious about reducing health disparities through precision medicine we must push back on the culture of whiteness in medicine and research. We can begin by explaining that equitable translation of genetic medicine will be a slow process because of the inequity that our field has created. Efforts to increase diversity among scientists are desperately needed, and unless we are committed to dismantling inherently racist structures and ideas in science, we will never achieve real equity.

We can empower ourselves and each other to acknowledge our own complicity and call on our funding institutions, our professional societies and our departments to make antiracist action a priority in our daily research practices. The long-overdue awakening emerging in American consciousness is incongruent with business as usual in our field, and it is past time to call in the revolution. Human genetics needs an antiracism plan now, otherwise, we must admit we plan to be racist.
Author's Note: This is an opinion and analysis article. I would like to acknowledge and thank colleagues and friends who provided support, input, helpful references and thoughtful conversation, including Jada BennTores, Ellen Clayton, Nancy Cox, Consuelo Hopkins Wilkins, Tad Davis, Brigid Davis and Donald Hucks.

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The study of human genetics emerged from a deep curiosity of our human inheritance that was firmly rooted in white supremacy. Francis Galton, one of the fathers of human genetics, who coined the term "eugenics," published Hereditary Genius (in which he asserted the genetic "superiority" of the upper classes) in 1869, 35 years after Great Britain ended slavery in British-held colonies and a mere four years after the United States emancipated enslaved African Americans.

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Scientists, including those who study race, like to see themselves as objectively exploring the world, above the political fray. But such views of scientific neutrality are naive, as study findings, inevitably, are influenced by the biases of the people conducting the work.

The American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois once wrote, "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." His words were borne out, in part, by science. It was the century when the scientifically backed enterprise of eugenics-improving the genetic quality of white, European races by removing people deemed inferior-gained massive popularity, with advocates on both sides of the Atlantic. It would take the Holocaust to show the world the logical endpoint of such horrific ideology, discrediting much race-based science and forcing eugenics' most hardline adherents into the shadows.

The post-war era saw scientists on the right-wing fringe find ways to cloak their racist views in more palatable language and concepts. And as Angela Saini convincingly argues in her new book, Superior: The Return of Race Science, published May 21 by Beacon Press, the "problem of the color line" still survives today in 21st-century science.

In her thoroughly researched book, Saini, a London-based science journalist, provides clear explanations of racist concepts while diving into the history of race science, from archaeology and anthropology to biology and genetics. Her work involved poring through technical papers, reports and books, and interviewing numerous scientists across various fields, sometimes asking uncomfortable questions about their research.

"Mainstream scientists, geneticists and medical researchers still invoke race and use these categories in their work, even though we have been told for 70 years that they have no biological meaning, that they have only social meaning," Saini says.

Scientific research has struggled with concepts of race for centuries, often proposing misleading or erroneous explanations of racial differences. Contentious debates among Europeans about the origins of modern humans began in the 19th century, and many of the continent's leading scientists believed firmly that Europeans exemplified the most evolved and intelligent humans. Human fossils in Europe provided the first data points in the budding field of paleoanthropology, but the region was in reality just where European archaeologists happened to start looking. Fossils, as well as cave art, DNA samples and other evidence later uncovered around the world pointed to a more complex picture of human origins: Elements of modern humans emerged throughout Africa, and those people migrated east and then north and west in waves.

Rather than distinct races, groupings or borders, the continually mixing populations produced only gradients, with some traits slightly more common in some regions than others. Lighter skin color in northern climates emerged late; some Britons were shocked to learn that Cheddar Man, the remains of a man who lived in southwest England almost 10,000 years ago, would today have been considered black.

In the 1950s, geneticists began to confirm what some archaeologists had already surmised: "Individual variation within population groups, overlapping with other population groups, turned out to be so large that the boundaries of race made less and less sense," Saini writes. The conclusion was that no "pure" races exist that are distinct from others. Despite this evidence, those eugenicists still practicing sought to prevent their supposedly superior race from being overrun by immigration, miscegenation and higher birth rates among other ethnicities.

While few people study or advocate for eugenics today, some scientists in the rapidly advancing field of genetics held onto related ideologies after World War II. They simply used different terms, Saini points out, as some continued with race-focused research while referring to "populations" and "human variation" rather than "races" and "racial differences." Geneticist James Watson, for instance, a co-discoverer of DNA's double helix structure, has frequently been the subject of withering criticism for voicing racist beliefs, including that differences on tests of intelligence have a racial component, and arguing that Indians are servile and that Chinese people have somehow become genetically conformist.

A handful of researchers with similar beliefs, including former Nazi scientist Otmar von Verschuer and British eugenicist Roger Pearson, had trouble getting their research published in reputable journals and formed their own journal in 1961. Mankind Quarterly became a platform for race science-a place to publish questionable research under the trappings of objective science. Intelligence, a more respected psychology journal that's published by the major publishing company Elsevier, also occasionally included papers with pseudoscientific findings about intelligence differences between races. Until recently, that journal had two eugenics supporters, Gerhard Heisenberg and Richard Lynn, on its editorial board. But by the time Saini finished her book late last year, after interviewing the journal's editor-in-chief, she saw that the pair had been removed from the journal's list of board members.

"The extreme stuff poses a dilemma for legitimate scientists, since you can't read every crank's work and falsify it," says Aaron Panofsky, a sociologist of science at UCLA and author of the book, Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the Development of Behavior Genetics. Researchers don't want to endow these papers with more legitimacy than they deserve, but they don't want to ignore them and risk fueling conspiracy theories, either.

While Mankind Quarterly has managed to hang on into the 21st century, "hard-core scientific racists are mostly old white men, and they're not being reproduced in academia," Panofsky says. Even so, plenty of racist, young white men continue to promote concepts of scientific racism, such as the participants in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia-an event that even the scientific journal felt the need to condemn.

Even more well-meaning epidemiological scientists nonetheless still use race as a crude proxy for myriad social and environmental factors. Saini cites an example of a 2017 study with statistical errors claiming that race and biology indicate that the airways of asthmatic black Americans become more inflamed than those of asthmatic white Americans. Black Americans do suffer more from asthma than whites do, but they're also affected more by environmental hazards like air pollution from highways and factories as well as disparities in access to high-quality healthcare. These many forms of inequality and structural racism-which sociologists have documented for decades-were swept under the rug in favor of a race variable that led to findings that could be easily misinterpreted.

In another example, Saini describes the ill-fated 1990s Human Genome Diversity Project, which analyzed the genetic variations of small, remote populations referred to as "isolates," including the Basques in Europe, the Kurds of eastern Turkey and Native American tribes. Indigenous rights activists, understandably sensitive to being exploited, resisted the project, surprising the naive scientists.

Time and time again, groupings by race, even if they don't use the term "race," can be dangerous and misleading to people looking for inherent biological differences. But Saini doesn't think we can be "colorblind" or "post-race" in scientific research either. Scientists who claim to be so tend to have the same problem as the asthma study, ignoring racial inequalities all around that influence a study's findings. Saini also explores the possibility of affirmative action policies, reparations or environmental justice advocacy, all intended to mitigate structural, historical and scientific racism.

Like many geneticists, Saini argues that since race is a social construct, it doesn't belong in genetics research. Scientists in other fields have the freedom to study race, she writes, but with that freedom comes responsibility. They can't afford to leave room for misinterpretation. Researchers using racial categories "should fully understand what they mean, be able to define them, and know their history," Saini writes.

The rest of us, too, need to be aware of racial stereotypes, lest we fall prey to them. "That's part of the reason that we're fascinated by DNA ancestry testing," Saini says. "The reason it matters to us is because we feel that these racial categories have some meaning, that they can tell us something about ourselves, and that's just wrong. They can't."

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The Disturbing Resilience of Scientific Racism

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A new book explores how racist biases continue to maintain a foothold in research today

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VUMC Day of Silence Additional Resources for Anti-Racism

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Diverse BookFinder

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First Time Here? Welcome to the Diverse BookFinder - Diverse BookFinder

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We’ve looked at over 2,000 children’s picture books to understand who is represented and how. Find out what we’ve found.

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Implicit bias test

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Diversity vs. Inclusion

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INCLUSION over Diversity | Kenyona Matthews | TEDxAkron

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Implicit bias explained

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We all have implicit biases. So what can we do about it? | Dushaw Hockett | TEDxMidAtlanticSalon

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Reducing bias infographic

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Unconscious bias is a mental shortcut made up of attitudes or stereotypes developed over time.

Unfortunately, when it goes unchecked, unconscious bias can have detrimental effects on your organisation's creativity, diversity and inclusivity.

Is there anything you can do to reduce unconscious bias? Yes! Look to the SELF model.

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Unconscious bias is a mental shortcut made up of attitudes or stereotypes developed over time. Unfortunately, when it goes unchecked, unconscious bias can have detrimental effects on your organisation's creativity, diversity and inclusivity. Is there anything you can do to reduce unconscious bias? Yes! Look to the SELF model.

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Senior academics must step up and take the lead in discussing intolerance, says Devang Mehta.

Devang Mehta

Devang Mehta is a postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratory of Plant Genomics at the Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

Last month, anti-Asian graffiti was painted in residences on the campus of my PhD alma mater, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, and Asian students' work was vandalized with racist slogans. That same week brought allegations that a leading astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, had used racist language towards trainees, among other bullying. (The astrophysicist has defended her behaviour, and says her comments were distorted and taken out of context; see news story.)

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Lab heads should learn to talk about racism

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Senior academics must step up and take the lead in discussing intolerance, says Devang Mehta. Senior academics must step up and take the lead in discussing intolerance, says Devang Mehta.

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Action Items for Anti-Racism Initiative at UASOM

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It is often said that STEM is changing for the better and, in many cases, this assertion holds true. There are efforts to diversify our fields and to acknowledge the importance of inclusivity in ways that might have been unimaginable a decade prior. Universities widely engage in efforts to provide educational outreach and be more mindful of the homogeneity in our environments. In some ways, it seems we are slowly parting from the notion that great scientists must focus solely on their craft, distancing themselves from political and community involvement. However, one area in which we still lack understanding is the effect of our slowly changing environments on underrepresented students in higher education. Staff, faculty and college figure heads may pride themselves on the recent changes while simultaneously failing to recognize that the labor which created this progress was born by their most marginalized. Most importantly, academia is failing to recognize the ways in which students of color and other marginalized groups are disproportionately affected by this labor and the national climate in which they are working in.

Cognitive reserve is often spoken about in the context of brain pathology and one's susceptibility or resilience to disease trajectory. When I refer to cognitive load or reserve in this post, I am speaking about cognitive flexibility as a form of currency. I am speaking about the mental freedom that comes with not fearing for one's safety or the safety of people who look like them in a given society. I am speaking about freedom from worry and discrimination; freedom to focus exclusively on one's craft without a chronically festering need for vigilance, action and change.
Simply put, this "cognitive load" is regarding race and oppression in the United States and how Black and Brown students and their intersecting identities carry both an invisible and visible workload that many of our cis, white and white passing peers do not share.
I share examples from my own lived experiences as one cis, bi, able bodied, biracial Black woman, however the reader should keep in mind that I do not speak for all Black women everywhere nor are my experiences and thoughts universally shared by all people of color and their intersecting identities. As scientists, this should already be at the forefront of your minds while reading any one person's work.
In this blog post, I want to challenge you today to earnestly consider the following questions about unequal labor in our STEM fields. We will go through some of them and dissect them together:

1. In our collective efforts to diversify STEM, provide anti-racism education and make spaces more inclusive, who do we see largely leading these efforts and pouring invisible labor into these initiatives?

2. What does political turmoil, racism and discrimination do to the cognitive load of students who are constantly subjected to this additional mental processing?

3. Why is the task of educating our uninformed peers largely burdening students of color? Why is this urgency lacking in our cis, white/white passing peers and faculty who are fully capable of sharing this workload?

4. What happens to students of color-particularly Black, Indigenous and Hispanic students who are the least represented in STEM fields-who navigate homogeneous environments and systemic racism both in our country at large and within academia? Especially if / when they are working overtime to better their communities in higher education programs?

5. How do we acknowledge what these students experience in higher education and that they are doubly affected when we task them with fixing our 'diversity problems' while our white and white passing peers are able to opt out? What enables white and white passing peers to often opt out?

6. How does this affect our ability to retain, recognize and promote Black students and faculty and other marginalized groups in higher education?

To start, I want to discuss events that took place this past week.

This week, the Black community mourned the delayed justice and murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Sean Reed and Nina Pop.

Arbery, a 25 year old Black man, was jogging in a neighborhood when a white father and son deemed him suspicious, attacked and shot him. It was only until a chilling murder video was released that public outcry demanded action from authorities. Two months after Arbery's death, police pressed charges against the two white men and convicted them of murder. For two months-and seemingly forever if not for that video and public awareness-his killers walked freely without punishment.

Reed, a 21 year old Black man, was in his car on May 6th live streaming on Facebook when police pulled him over. The video shows a terrified Reed asking his followers to please come and help him. Reed gets out of the car and begins running, still filming, and gun shots fire over one dozen times at his back.

Pop, a transgender Black woman, was found stabbed to death in Minneapolis on May 3rd. She was the 10th Trans murder just this year. In 2018, data from the Human Rights Commission shows that 82% of Trans deaths are women of color and most of these are Black women. In many cases, the murders are never fully investigated and the perpetrators walk freely.

While the rest of the country expressed shock or indifference, the Black community sat with our disparate reality: that police brutality, white supremacy and anti-Black racism have long been unaddressed and untreated, continuously festering in our nation's collective psyche.

I sat with this heaviness all week, vacillating between depthless sadness and anger. Everywhere I've lived, from the south to the northwest to the northeast, I have experienced racism and learned of disproportionate murders that plague my community. I hastily finished my final semester coursework, then channeled these emotions into a project I started as a first year Neuroscience and Behavior PhD student called M.U.S.E. (mentorship for underrepresented STEM enthusiasts.) M.U.S.E. aims to provide representation and mentorship to underrepresented students in STEM. Although I have poured over 60 hours into initially building the site and countless more hours managing it with our Board of Directors, I managed to succeed in my coursework, present at conferences, spearhead 2 new experiments, apply for 8 fellowships/grants, do outreach events and mentor several undergrads in my lab in my first semester. Managing M.U.S.E is something I have chosen to further the path of others like me and will continue even with a full summer schedule and the current global pandemic ( which is disproportinately affecting Black & Indigenous people.) In addition, my outspokenness online has resulted in hundreds of students asking me for advice on navigating academia as first generation or underrepresented students; I spend countless hours answering every single message.

Whereas the bulk of my weeks are spent working on neuroscience coursework and research, my evenings and weekends are spent doing a different sort of labor-vigilantly following the news, donating the little I have, educating myself and others and volunteering in a variety of roles. This has been the norm for years, though I have unique privileges in terms of time and money thatnot every Black or Brown person has. I started my PhD program at 29 years old; enough time to build wealth, work several jobs for 7 years and gain influence as an athlete.

Now that you have read about my personal experiences and level of involvement, I want to go through the questions I posed earlier and briefly discuss them, inviting you to constantly ask yourselves "what is my role in social justice efforts and in what ways do I opt out or contribute to this work? In what ways have I been blind to the labor of my peers and not educated myself or shared in this workload?"

In our collective efforts to diversify STEM and make spaces more inclusive, who do we see largely leading these efforts and pouring invisible labor into these initiatives?

In my experiences, I notice that students of color, especially BIPOC (Black and Indigenous people of color), go above and beyond when it comes to bettering their communities and educating others about social justice. For many of us in academia, this is unpaid labor on top of trying to thrive in higher education. We are praised for being champions of diversity while our white and white passing peers focus exclusively on their science. This chronic workload, though commended and sometimes expected from people in positions of power, makes me wonder if academics fully register what toll this might be taking on Black and Brown bodies who have already disproportionately been affected by decades and centuries of legalized racism.

The privilege of being able to "just focus on science" is a thought that has haunted me. I love science with my entire being and on so many weekends I crave being able to sit with my science books and read them cover to cover, but I cannot turn away from all that is happening in our country and to my communities. That is not an option for so many of us, especially Black, Indigenous and Hispanic people in STEM fields, because we have lived and seen these horrors firsthand; because we know what it is like to be called racial slurs in public, harassed by the police, followed extra closely at stores and assumed to be stealing, seen our families struggle, etc. Some of us cannot abandon our lived experiences with poverty, violence, or societal injustice and focus exclusively on ourselves. It is important to mention two things: 1) even if Black and Brown students are able to just focus only on science, cognitive reserve might still be hampered by chronic microaggressions and alienation in predominantly white academic spaces; 2) many Black and Brown students may be told to opt out as a survival mechanism or to ensure their own successes to reach the desired level of power before investing in the community.

What does political turmoil, racism and discrimination do to the cognitive reserve and health of students who are constantly subjected to this additional mental load?

For many of us I imagine our mental health and cognitive reserves are struggling while we pursue demanding work in our PhD or higher education programs. Research has shown that allostatic load-the wearing of bodies exposed to chronic stress-may be a contributing factor to the disproportionate aging and health outcomes that plague Black communities. ( Forrester et al 2019.) From my own experiences, I can say with certainty that every single day my mental health is affected by my race within and beyond academia. My non-Black peers infuriatingly share that racism still exists, seem confused when I share that students confuse me for the only other Black woman in my cohort, fail to notice when all of the Black and many Latinx people always sit together during seminars, say nothing when murders and injustice befall the Black community, etc. These things and more I am actively aware of, but my white and white passing peers don't even recognize or consciously process it. That unintentional ignorance is stressful to be surrounded by daily. That alone adds to my mental load aside from constantly experiencing microaggressions and absorbing a steady stream of news that white supremacy continues to become ever emboldened by our current Commander in Chief.

Why is the task of educating our uninformed peers largely burdening students of color? Why is this urgency lacking in our cis, white peers and faculty who are fully capable of sharing this workload?

Education and anti-racism work does not and should not solely be carried out by students of color (though, for the tempo of these movements, I recognize the importance for POC, Queer/Trans and Disabled leadership.) Cis white and white passing peers lack an internal urgency for this work, but they do not lack our capability of opening up a news page or Google tab. This is where my empathy wanes, because I do not identify as Trans, Indigenous, Physically Disabled or any number of identities underrepresented in STEM, but the information is there and people are screaming to be heard. How is it then that so many of my peers do not share in this workload? Why is there such a high tolerance for inaction? My best guess is that many of my white and white passing peers, aside from having varying degrees of comfort and built in privilege with the current levels of white supremacy, do not have many Black and Brown friends or leadership in their environments who stress the importance of action; this might make news stories easier to dehumanize and complicity seen as tolerable. When you or those you know personally struggle in a like domain, perhaps it is easier to humanize events and people instead of constantly opting out or pointing to the one Black or Brown outspoken person as an angry outlier. Regardless of the cause, this is a privilege that needs to be challenged. There is danger and something unforgivable about those with the most listened to voices, institutional power, disproportionate wealth and time opting out of social justice work.

How does this affect our ability to retain, recognize and promote Black and Brown students and other marginalized groups in higher education?

One fear I have is that, in recognizing how unequally this workload is carried by marginalized students, that our generosity of time and money will hinder us in the long run. Studies already show, for instance, that Black families hold 10 cents to every $1.00 a white family has. Looking at the effects of years and years of legalized racism, we can see that different racial groups have very different starting points when they enter higher education. In addition, underrepresented racial groups are sometimes burdened with providing for their families; the wealth they build is distributed among many people in the family whereas more privileged persons can keep and build upon that wealth for generations.

The numbers today of racial diversity among STEM faculty is appalling. In the general field of Biology (in 2018) it was noted that 0.7% of professors were Black and 3% were Hispanic. No data exists to my knowledge for Indigenous STEM faculty across the United States and I can only imagine what these numbers are for underrepresented groups in my field of neuroscience. We already have a problem supporting and retaining underrepresented students of color and their intersecting identities in STEM. Just one potential cause I can think of is being disproportionately burdened with work and-though getting praised-not with tangible increases in salary, recognition or promotion. These environments may be further hostile to BIPOC and students of color, who then opt out of pursuing academic careers altogether.

Our extracurricular involvement in higher education is central to some of us, yet this may be a reason some of us fall behind in higher education, are passed up for promotions, build wealth slower than our white and white passing peers, etc. It is not hard to see that focusing exclusively on oneself and being less thoughtful with one's money could lead to greater success and financial security, especially if one starts from an already elevated place in society.

We invite Black and Brown students (and their intersecting identities) into spaces that are not equipped or educated enough to support them. Our institutions profit from their continuous labor and we fail to recognize the disparity in cognitive load that these students may experience. This is not to only focus on marginalized people who are hypervigilant about addressing JEDI work; we often fail to recognize how hard it is to simply exist as Black and Brown students in a society that is treating us disposably.

There are many more questions we can ask about the inadequacy of STEM fields to fully tackle their biggest questions without a diversity of thought and how intersectionality of identities creates for even more horrific outcomes in STEM. The takeaway I hope you leave with today, in addition to becoming better at asking yourselves these questions on your own in the future, is this:

I asked you all questions about addressing our varying cognitive loads in academia and why this burden seems to rest predominantly on students of color to educate our peers. I challenge you all to ask yourselves: how often you think about race in a given day, how often do you take the initiative to educate yourselves, what anti-racism work you have done within yourself and in your community, how much privilege do you have to focus exclusively on your STEM field and how do you plan to share in the load that your peers of color and their intersecting identities take on every day?
Book resources to begin anti-racism work and education for yourselves:

1. Me and White Supremacy Workbook

2. "Me and White Supremacy" by Layla Saad

3. "So You Want to Talk About Race" by Iljeoma Oluo

4. "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander

5. "White fragility" by Robin DiAngelo

6. "Eloquent Rage" by Brittney Cooper

7. "Why I am No Longer Talking to White People About Race" by Renni Eddo-Lodge

8. "Between the World and Me" by Ta-Nehisi Coates

9. "Sister Outsider" by Audre Lorde

10. "An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States" by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

11. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X Kendi

12. The Autobiography of Malcolm X

13. NY Times Anti-Racist Book List

14. Aljazeera "Know Their Names"

15. A list of Black Owned Bookstores across the US you can financially support

Click here to see original article and think about our collective roles in social change

Special thanks to Michelle Abunaja, Hehewutei Amakali, Kate Otter, Maggie Yeung and Briana Wellen for their editing and feedback.

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Cognitive Reserve and Racial Privilege in STEM

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We say that STEM is changing for the better and, in many cases, this holds true. This post asks questions about ways in which higher education may have unintentional blind spots and the effects this may have on students of color.

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Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: The academic world has become increasingly diverse over the past few decades. However, many of us have unconscious biases against certain groups of people, and common practices in evaluating merit have flaws that can perpetuate these biases. We, a group of eLife Community Ambassadors within the Intersectionality Initiative of the 2019-2020 program, have identified five current practices that are fundamental to academic science that may be hindering inclusivity in science. These practices include hiring, mentoring, writing reference letters, and reviewing grants and manuscripts. To try and level the playing field and increase inclusivity in science, we have compiled a guideline for each of these practices that are intended to help inform scientists, mentors, funders, and journals on ways to mitigate biases. The overall goal of these guidelines is to make science more inclusive and to limit bias in these core features of academic science.

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Guidelines Toward Inclusive Practices in Academics by eLife Community Ambassadors

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The academic world has become increasingly diverse over the past few decades. However, many of us have unconscious biases against certain groups of people, and common practices in evaluating merit have flaws that can perpetuate these biases.

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Four ways to get started.

Companies increasingly rely on diverse, multidisciplinary teams that combine the collective capabilities of women and men, people of different cultural heritage, and younger and older workers. But simply throwing a mix of people together doesn't guarantee high performance; it requires inclusive leadership - leadership that assures that all team members feel they are treated respectfully and fairly, are valued and sense that they belong, and are confident and inspired. Research involving 3,500 ratings by employees of 450 leaders found that inclusive leaders share six behaviors - and that leaders often overestimate how inclusive they really are. These are the behaviors: visible commitment, humility, awareness of bias, curiosity about others, cultural intelligence, and effective collaboration.

Companies increasingly rely on diverse, multidisciplinary teams that combine the collective capabilities of women and men, people of different cultural heritage, and younger and older workers. But simply throwing a mix of people together doesn't guarantee high performance; it requires inclusive leadership - leadership that assures that all team members feel they are treated respectfully and fairly, are valued and sense that they belong, and are confident and inspired.

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Accelerate your career with Harvard ManageMentor®. HBR Learning's online leadership training helps you hone your skills with courses like Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging. Earn badges to share on LinkedIn and your resume. Access more than 40 courses trusted by Fortune 500 companies.

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Juliet Bourke, PhD, is a professor of practice in the School of Management and Governance, UNSW Business School, UNSW. She is the author of Which Two Heads Are Better Than One: The Extraordinary Power of Diversity of Thinking and Inclusive Leadership. Email her at juliet.bourke@unsw.edu.au

New!

HBR Learning

Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Course

Accelerate your career with Harvard ManageMentor®. HBR Learning's online leadership training helps you hone your skills with courses like Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging. Earn badges to share on LinkedIn and your resume. Access more than 40 courses trusted by Fortune 500 companies.

How to build a better, more just workplace.

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Why Inclusive Leaders Are Good for Organizations, and How to Become One

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Companies increasingly rely on diverse, multidisciplinary teams that combine the collective capabilities of women and men, people of different cultural heritage, and younger and older workers. But simply throwing a mix of people together doesn't guarantee high performance; it requires inclusive leadership - leadership that assures that all team members feel they are treated respectfully and fairly, are valued and sense that they belong, and are confident and inspired.

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VUMC Medicine Grand Rounds

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MGR: How Structural Racism Affects Health and Health Care | MGR: 6-25-20

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science is for everyone — until it's not

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‎Short Wave: Science Is For Everyone - Until It's Not on Apple Podcasts

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‎Why novelist Brandon Taylor made the hard decision to walk away from science - and the lessons his story contains for any community working to be more inclusive.

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As Confederate Statues Come Down, It's Worth Remembering That the Civil War Wasn't the Only American Conflict Involving Slavery

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More important, more direct and much less well-publicized was the impact of slavery in instigating the American Revolution

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Ever since the recent Black Lives Matter protests, leaders have called for a national conversation on race.

Race is a thorny topic, and for people seeking to understand others' racism - or their own - it can be difficult to know where to turn.

So please consider this a safe space where you can pose questions you may hesitate to ask elsewhere. To help answer them, we've reached out to scholars and other experts on race. Send us your questions - there's a place to do that at the bottom of this page - and we'll try to answer those, too.

Our purpose here is not to chide, preach or settle historical scores. We're all in this together.

And we all have questions. Here are some of yours.

We'll keep updating this by answering more of your questions as they come in.

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Ever since the recent Black Lives Matter protests, leaders have called for a national conversation on race. Race is a thorny topic, and for people seeking to understand others' racism - or their own - it can be difficult to know where to turn.

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Opinion | You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument (Published 2020)

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The black people I come from were owned and raped by the white people I come from. Who dares to tell me to celebrate them?

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On structural racism, implicit bias, and what white people do (and don't) say

Photo courtesy of the author.

I am regularly the only black kid in the photo. I have mastered the well-timed black joke, fit to induce a guilty "you thought it but couldn't say it" laugh from my white peers. I know all the words to "Mr. Brightside" by the Killers.

I am a token black friend. The black one in the group of white people. This title is not at all a comment on the depth of my relationships; I certainly am blessed to have the friends that I do. But by all definitions of the term, I am in many ways its poster child. And given the many conversations occurring right now around systemic racism, it would feel wrong not to use my position as a respected friend within a multitude of different white communities to contribute to the current dialogue. I believe my story speaks directly to the covert nature of the new breed of racism - its structural side, along with implicit bias - and may prove helpful to many I know who seek a better understanding.

Growing up, I lived in the inner city of Boston, in Roxbury. I attended school in the suburbs through a program called METCO - the longest continuously running voluntary school desegregation program in the country, which began in the late 1960s. My two siblings and I attended school in Weston, Massachusetts, one of the nation's wealthiest towns. The place quickly became our second home, and alongside Boston, I would count it equally as the place I was raised. All three of us did very well by all standards. We had all been co-presidents of the school, my brother and I were both football captains, and all three of us went on to top-end universities.

For those wondering about the structural side of systemic racism, I'd ask you to consider a few questions. First: Why does METCO still exist? Segregation ended more than 60 years ago, yet there is a still a fully functioning integration program in our state. We haven't come very far at all. Many of our schools remain nearly as segregated as they were in the 1960s.

Second: What is the point? Weston improves its diversity. Without us, most of Weston's students would go through all those years seeing possibly three or four local black faces in their schools (and that's the reality for many white people in this country). As for the Boston students, most of whom are black, they receive a much higher-quality education. Property taxes, a structural form of racism meant to allow segregation to endure, have ensured that while schools have grown increasingly better in our suburbs, the inner-city schools continue to struggle with resources, attendance, and graduation rates.

Lastly: Why was I able to be so successful? A major criticism of the METCO program is that it doesn't produce better outcomes for its students than the city schools, so it just acts as a brain drain from the city. I am an exception. I held leadership roles in the school, was an accomplished athlete and student, and went on to what was, at the time, the best public university in the country. What's easily overlooked, though, is how my circumstances differed from the average student of color coming from the city. I came from a two-parent household. My mother was able to work from home our entire life, so she could take us places when we needed. Compared to other black families, we were relatively well-off financially, which afforded me a car in high school and thus allowed me to be highly involved. I had a stable church and home life and food security. This combination is uncommon for a young black kid in America.

In a piece my brother wrote reflecting on the current situation, he considered whether black privilege was real. He and I have both considered how our differences from the common story of black people made us "privileged." For instance, our immersion in the white community, our success in school and now in the workforce, and the fact that we grew up in a middle-class black household (highly uncommon in Boston) led us to believe we had somehow transcended the plight of the black man. Yet, what scared us both so much as we watched the videos of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd is that we clearly had not. In both cases, it could have been us. There is no escape. There is no level of success that will spare you. We are black men, and that is all that matters to some.

In the past, I've usually stayed quiet on these issues. Often, the pain of diving deep into them was too much to regularly confront. College changed many of my attitudes, but none more so than my full acceptance that racism is alive and well around me.

In college, I sought out more black friends, choosing to room with three people of color because I wanted to grow more connected to that side of my identity. The room afforded me a space to appreciate aspects of black culture and share stories of anger with people who looked like me. Many of my clearest interactions with racism occurred in college. It was there that I began to confront knowledge that roused more frustration within me, such as the war on drugs and its history as a weapon against black communities - although on every college visit, I watched people ingest more drugs and smoke with more impunity than I ever saw in the hood.

The length of my journey makes me inclined to be more patient with others in this process, as it's taken me this much time to wake up. We should all be reasonably patient with one another, but I would encourage individuals to not be patient with themselves and to treat these issues with the urgency they deserve. The anger on display over the past week should exhibit the need for change.

So many of my experiences growing up speak to implicit biases against black people. I think of how quickly others in school assumed I had a single mother, simply because my father, much like many of theirs, didn't visit school often. Or the number of times I've heard "you are so articulate" in a conversation where all I've shared is my name and other small personal details. Standing alone, each instance may seem insignificant or merely a compliment to my upbringing and education. However, the frequency with which I've received that comment tells otherwise. It reveals how a black kid speaking properly is surprising, and further, how it makes me appear worthy of sharing the person's company.

I also realized that the token black friend is not spared the realities facing a black kid from the hood. One morning, while getting ready for school, I heard my mother scream outside, followed by my brother sprinting down our stairs. In our 150-year-old home, every quick step down the stairs resembled a drumbeat. I followed my brother to find my mom standing at her car, visibly shaken, telling us, "He's running up the street. He took my phone." My brother and I, both barefoot, sprinted up our street and two others until we caught the culprit. I jumped on his back to stop him until my brother caught up, at which point Raj chewed him out and we took our stuff back - both too young and inexperienced in the ways of the streets to know we probably should have beat him up. The point is, though, we still had to go to school that day. And I remember being too embarrassed to tell any of my friends about what occurred that morning, thinking it would change for the worse the way they thought about me or where I came from every day.

I started carrying a knife during my junior year of high school. It quickly became a running joke among my core group of friends - whenever someone would say something out of pocket or stupid, we'd say, "Get the knife," and I'd comedically lay it on the table. What those friends definitely didn't know is that I carried the knife because I was afraid I might get jumped making my daily walk from the train station to my house late most evenings. How could my white friends from suburbia ever understand that?

In the wake of the past week's events, I've reflected on my interactions with the police. These interactions lifted the veil of black privilege I thought existed, though it was likely only afforded to me because of my military affiliation.

I was once pulled over in a cemetery, less than one minute after getting back into my car after visiting a friend's grave, only to be asked, "What are you doing here?" The cop had been parked right by me the entire time, so he obviously just seen me out at a gravestone alone.

"Visiting my friend's grave before heading back to school tomorrow, sir," I said.

The officer's aggressive demeanor changed only after I told him I went to the Naval Academy, at which point we entered a friendly conversation about his days at Norwich. What stuck with me is what he could've done in those cemetery back roads without another living person in sight - no witnesses, no cameras.

Another time, when I'd walked back to my best friend's empty house after a party, I accidentally set off the alarm, bringing the cops buzzing to his door. I wonder if the only reason it went so smoothly is because I quickly identified myself as a member of the military, opening their ears to hear the full story of what was happening. I think of what might've happened if they'd mistaken me, holding my military ID in my hand as I walked out the door, for something else.

It's tough to realize how rarely these possibilities occurred to me when I was younger. When I was pulled over numerous times, often without cause, driving to a hockey game in Weston or parked talking to my white girlfriend, I didn't consider that the cops might have had it against me. When I did witness these biases, I quickly brushed them off as insignificant.

Early in middle school, I arrived to our high school's football game with a group of friends, all white, to find three or four policemen standing by the entrance. I greeted them with a "Good evening, officers," and then quietly said to my friends, "You gotta befriend them so they are on your side later." My buddies thought it was hilarious, and I had succeeded in making the boys laugh. Looking back, I realize they didn't understand that I was speaking to something legitimate. I was no older than 12 or 13, and I already understood that the police would not be inclined to help me. It was only funny to my friends because they'd never had those sorts of conversations.

I think back to when my friends never understood why I wasn't allowed to play with water guns - or any toy guns, for that matter - when I was a boy. I'd be so excited to visit a friend's house and use their airsoft gun in the backyard. I used to get so frustrated when my mom told us it was "too dangerous" for black boys to do that and that someone would mistake it for a real gun. When I was 16, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot and killed while playing with a replica toy airsoft gun. I realized my mom was right.

I think of the way the black girls were treated as second rate in high school. Guys rarely tried to talk to them romantically, and if they did, others discussed it with an undertone of comedy. I never felt this way, personally, but didn't realize until college that my silence was compliance. I was participating in denying dignity to the black women around me.

This attitude from my white friends didn't end in high school, either. This past year, I was at a bar in Narragansett, Rhode Island, where I'd quickly befriended one of the guys my friend had brought with him. At one point, I expressed my interest in a girl who had just entered the bar. He asked me to point her out, so I did, also noting that she was black. He responded, "Yeah bro, she's cute, but you could have one of the white girls here!" I questioned his statement, and he realized it didn't fly with me. We eventually moved on and continued the night, but I couldn't get it out of my head. He truly didn't think anything of it when he said it. And he assumed that I would agree with him. To him, the preference for white women was undisputed, so he suggested it unapologetically. It was especially hard for me because, outside of that statement, there was nothing to suggest he was racist. He had treated me with nothing but love and admiration and accepted me into his crew. It was simply ignorance, which had probably been reinforced countless times. That was difficult to wrestle with.

These attitudes directly contribute to and maintain systemic racism within our society. Our disparate relationships with the police, along with messages sent to the black males when they "speak properly," or to black girls about their inferiority (spoken or unspoken), paint an inaccurate picture of what a black person is supposed to be. These attitudes foster the ignorance and apathy that is so rightly being called out right now. They ensure the survival of this corrupt system.

I think of times when my own ignorance let me buy into the insensitivity shown toward the black struggle, often to induce laughs. During a visit to a Louisiana plantation during my sophomore year of high school, I shamefully recall posing for a picture with a noose around my neck. I remember walking around downtown New Orleans later that evening with it around my friend's neck, me jokingly walking him like a dog. Two black guys on the street, a bit older than us, said to me, "That's not fucking funny, bro." I immediately filled with guilt upon recognizing my stupidity, and I struggle even today to understand what made me think either were permissible at the time. Sharing that story relieves some of the guilt, yes, but it also speaks to how being wrapped up in white teen culture led me to buy into, and even spearhead, the insensitivity that is often exhibited toward issues of black struggle that are incorrectly categorized as "in the past."

If you don't agree, why did none of my white friends call me out for it? Yes, we were young at the time, but I'd ask: Why didn't we know any better? We assumed the pain of that type of racism was dead, but we all just witnessed a modern-day lynching on camera.

Then there are the instances most white people will recognize, though they probably never knew how damaging their words were. Every token black friend can recall the times when a white friend chooses to dub you "the whitest black kid I know." It's based on the way I speak or dress or the things I'm into, and it's a comment on me not fitting the image they have of a black person. When I resist accepting such a title, the white person claims it's a compliment - as if the inherent superiority of whiteness should leave me honored to be counted among their ranks.

More impactfully, it suggests that my blackness is something that can be taken from me. That my identity as a black man fades because I am into John Mayer or I've visited the Hamptons. And further, it assumes that my black identity is not something I am proud of. It ignores the fact that the acculturation and assimilation I experienced growing up with all white friends was not voluntary. It suggests that my blackness is a burden, when in fact, minimizing my blackness was most often my burden. Another example: when I am criticized by my white friends for code-switching when I am with my black friends, just because they don't understand the slang and how it connects black people to a common culture.

The biases are evident; you just need to pay attention. Believe me, because I wasn't spared from buying into them myself. It wasn't until I got to college that I began to realize how much subconscious effort I'd put into being as unstereotypically black as possible. Whether in my choices concerning the way I dress, speak, or even dance, I noticed that, without realizing it, I'd habitually quelled aspects of my black identity. And based on that ability, I consistently inflated my self-worth and considered myself superior to my fellow black brothers. I had unknowingly bought into the very biases set out against me.

I'd emphasize that most white people do not understand their level of ignorance - especially the good ones, who mean well, and that negligence is part of the problem.

Many of the white people I know have no concept of the role they've played, passively or actively, in perpetuating these conditions. They have no idea how much we long to hear them speak up for us and to embrace some of the discomfort around these issues with us. Furthermore, the good ones are oblivious to the level of overt racism still out there. I have been among my white friends each time I've been called "nigger" by a stranger. And every time, my white friends seemed shocked. They had been misled to believe that kind of overt racism only happened in the past (or in To Kill a Mockingbird). Comfortingly, they always verbally leaped to my defense, and the savior complex within them encouraged them to seek retribution.

In one vivid case, at a bar in Cape Cod, after I'd just finished a conversation with a friend, one guy, not realizing I was still in earshot or aware of my relationship with this friend, came over to him and asked, "You really talking to that nigger?" My friend was stunned but immediately came back at the guy, his anger for me visible. He then came to me, boasting that he has black friends as if that should warrant him a pass.

As much as each situation ruined my night, everything after went well, and I was embraced by a group of allies who wanted to fight for me when they heard that word. I had no further reason to be upset. Yet, probably only the friend who walked ahead of the group with me knows I cried my eyes out the entire walk home, unable to explain how that word garnered so much control over me.

The problematic result of these overtly racist situations is that good white people feel liberated from any responsibility concerning the privilege, structural racism, and implicit biases that do not make them racist themselves, but that they do benefit from. This moment is one of the first times I have felt it was not only okay but encouraged to share these things.

If there is one thing every token black friend knows, it is that we are not to provoke serious discussions of racial issues among our white crowd. We should only offer an opinion on such matters when invited to do so by our white peers. Further, we should ensure that the opinion is in line enough with the shared opinion of our white friends, as to not make it too awkward or ostracizing.

It doesn't need to be, and shouldn't be this way. Many of us are eager to share our stories, and we have been waiting for the invitation to do so.

I am comforted when I see white people call things out for what they are. When my friends and I rented a 16-passenger van for a New Year's Eve trip to Montreal, we found ourselves held up at the border coming back. The older agent, surveying the passengers, asked how we all knew each other, to which we answered, "We all went to high school together." The officer then followed up by singling me out, "And how do you fit in here?" What he was suggesting about my place in the group of all white guys was telling enough, and the guys I was with were quick to support me and point it out to their parents when debriefing the trip once we arrived home. If only they knew how often I'd experienced situations like that one. White people should know that we need more conversations about little things like this. It's not our job to heal the world, but if we can start by getting people to question small interactions and beliefs, we can begin moving toward progress.

The white friends I grew up with have shared with me how thankful they are to have had me in their lives during their developmental years. They wonder what attitudes they might harbor if they hadn't had a black best friend their entire lives. They arrived at college to befriend kids who had never met a black person in their lives, and they encountered countless out of pocket statements from those individuals.

I am constantly thankful that I grew up with genuine white friends, unlike many of my extended family members. My cousin said to me once, "I don't like being around white people... I always feel like they hate me." I was able to learn that, more often than not, that isn't the case. Still, my cousin points to the overwhelming sentiment that black lives are not accepted or celebrated by white people.

Recent events present a unique opportunity to begin conversations that have been waiting to happen for far too long. To both black and white people, I'd write that understanding is a two-way street. To my white friends, I'd tell you that while that's true, white people have a longer journey to get to where we need to meet. It is time for white people to muster the courage to call out those comments you hear from your parents or uncles and aunts. The pass has been given for far too long, and every time you don't speak up, you enable far worse words and behaviors. For those of you who think an old dog can't learn new tricks, I'd point to the numerous white adults who have texted me this week noting that they have been in their bubble for too long, and asking me to keep sending them content. It's time to pop the bubble.

My experience as the token black friend has allowed me a unique lens into many of the gaps that currently prevent mutual understanding between white and black people. I have spent so much time in the white community and enjoyed the privileges that come with that, yet I am still affected by these issues. Despite my story's obvious differences from that of the average young black man, I believe it speaks to the immediate need for change. Additionally, it serves as an example of a genuinely meaningful relationship between a black person and white people and emphasizes the ability of white people to be either allies or enemies.

I will never turn my back on the black community. You'll bump our music and rep our athletes, but will you stand with us when it's not convenient? The pain is real. The stories are real. Our call for help is real. My uncle posted on Facebook yesterday, "When the dust settles, I wonder if anything will actually change?" To be honest, I'm not sure how quickly or how much things will change. But I know that one thing is directly within our individual control. You can celebrate black lives by making a choice to inquire about them, to educate yourself, and to question many of the norms around us. You no longer have the excuse of being unaware of your own ignorance. I'd reword my uncle's post to a question that we should all ask ourselves: "When the dust settles, I wonder if I will actually change?"

"No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite." - Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

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I am regularly the only black kid in the photo. I have mastered the well-timed black joke, fit to induce a guilty "you thought it but couldn't say it" laugh from my white peers. I know all the words to "Mr. Brightside" by the Killers. I am a token black friend.

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When Johnson & Johnson's CEO codified the company's principles into a credo in 1943, corporate value statements were a novelty. Today they are ubiquitous among large corporations. In our study of nearly 700 large companies, we found that more than 80% published an official set of corporate values on their website. 1 Senior leaders, in particular, love to talk about their company culture. Over the past three decades, more than three-quarters of CEOs interviewed in a major business magazine discussed their company's culture or core values - even when not specifically asked about it. 2

Corporate values statements are nearly universal, but do they matter? Critics dismiss them as cheap talk with no impact on employees' day-to-day behavior. Recent corporate scandals support the skeptics' view. Volkswagen, Wells Fargo, and Barclays each included ethics or integrity among their core values in the years before their wrongdoings were discovered, while Boeing hit the trifecta by listing integrity, quality, and safety among its "enduring values."

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It is tempting to dismiss corporate value statements as irrelevant, but ignoring them is a mistake. Even when companies fall short of their aspirations, official statements still cast light on the values leaders consider critical for success. They also spell out the cultural elements that leaders believe distinguish their company in the eyes of employees, customers, and other stakeholders.

The Research

To identify official statements of corporate culture, we reviewed websites and annual reports of 689 large, mainly U.S. organizations between March and July 2018. We identified 562 companies (82% of our initial sample) that published official statements of their corporate culture. i

We grouped similar values based on the most frequently occurring unigrams and sequential bigrams, stemming to term roots (for example, innovat* to capture innovation and innovator) and excluding stop words. ii The most commonly occurring unigrams were integrity (occurred in 298 value titles), respect* (180), and innov* (152).

The first and second coauthors independently hand-coded those values that were unclassified based on unigrams and bigrams, looking for opportunities to consolidate synonyms (for example, teamwork, collegiality, collaboration) within a single category. We agreed on 82% of classifications in our first pass, discussed and resolved all disagreements, and when necessary created new categories using verbatim language from the companies' websites and annual reports.

This process resulted in 62 distinct cultural topics mentioned by at least 1% of the companies in our sample. iii 11% of values were classified as "other" if they were too ambiguous to code (such as, commitment, contribute, involvement) or when items were clear but cited by fewer than six companies in our sample.

We then compared each company's official values following the approach described in the body of this article. The employee evaluations were taken from the 2019 MIT Sloan Management Review and Glassdoor Culture 500, which used cutting-edge AI to analyze the free text comments from 1.2 million Glassdoor employee reviews to systematically measure corporate culture along nine common values including integrity, respect, and innovation.

Official corporate values only matter to the extent they shape employees' activities and decisions on a day-to-day basis. This raises a fundamental question: How well does behavior inside a company align with cultural aspirations? In other words, when it comes to their core values, do companies walk the talk?

To measure the gap between aspiration and action, we collected the official corporate values statements for more than 500 large organizations and compared these official values with how employees view their companies on common corporate values based on an analysis of more than 1.2 million Glassdoor reviews.

Prevalence of Official Corporate Cultures by Industry

The retail and accommodation and food service sectors together employed nearly 1 in 5 U.S. workers in 2018. iv A handful of companies in these sectors, including Costco, Trader Joe's and Wegmans Food Markets, have distinguished themselves by building a healthy culture for their front-line employees. Their emphasis on culture is relatively rare. Of the 35 industries we studied, official corporate values statements were least common in industries that employed large numbers of less skilled workers. Five of the industries with the lowest incidence of published values were apparel retail, hotels and leisure, fast food, general retail, and grocery stores.

What Companies Aspire To

Corporate culture means different things to different people. There are more than 50 distinct definitions in the academic literature, including the stories employees tell to interpret events, organizational rituals, and corporate symbols. 3 The official culture statements we studied, in contrast, display a striking consistency in how they define corporate culture.

Three-quarters of the culture statements include an introduction explaining the role of corporate culture. The primary function of corporate culture, according to these descriptions, is to guide the actions and decisions of employees throughout the organization. 4 Aligning behavior with official culture allows companies to differentiate themselves from competitors, build trust with stakeholders, increase brand equity, and attract great talent.

Nearly all the organizations we studied rely on a set of core values as the guideposts for helping employees align their behavior with corporate culture. Of the companies in our sample, 72% referred to their company's culture as values or core values, and even employees at companies that use other labels - principles, philosophy, or ideals, for example - cited values as the foundation of their culture. The realities of how companies talk about their culture is consistent with a prominent theory that defines organizational culture as "a set of norms and values that are widely shared and strongly held throughout the organization." 5 We'll use this definition of corporate culture throughout this paper.

The typical company lists a handful of values - the most common number of reported values is five, and nearly three-quarters of companies in our sample listed between three and seven values. (See "How Many Corporate Values Do Companies Have?") Companies are not, however, always disciplined in spelling out their core values. Ten percent of organizations listed two or more sets of values under different names (core values and corporate culture, for example) on different parts of their website. Others packed multiple values into a single item. JP Morgan Chase's business principles, for example, included "a commitment to integrity, fairness, and responsibility," which we count as three distinct values. When we accounted for nested values, the average company in our sample listed seven distinct values.

One of the most striking findings of our analysis is the sheer number and diversity of values cited. We identified 62 distinct values mentioned by at least 1% of the companies with official values statements. Integrity was the most common, listed by 65% of all companies, followed by collaboration (53%), customer focus (48%), and respect (35%). No other value was cited by more than one-third of companies, and the list contains a long tail of values mentioned by less than 10% of companies. (See "What Companies Say They Value.")

While some values are more common than others, none are universal. Even integrity, the most frequently cited, is listed by less than two-thirds of all organizations in our sample. The lack of universal values is explained, in part, by variance across industries. All of the companies in the construction and engineering and health care services industries, for example, included integrity among their core values, while less than 20% of internet companies did so. (See "Stated Corporate Values Vary Across Industries.") Even within the same industry, however, we observed significant variation in the choice of core values.

The diversity of values calls into question the usefulness of frameworks that attempt to reduce all corporate cultures to a handful of universal types. One popular model, for example, argues that all corporate cultures can be plotted along two dimensions - internal versus external orientation on one dimension and flexibility versus control on the other. 6 The cultures that correspond to the resulting quadrants - clan, ad-hocracy, market, and hierarchy - are presented as archetypes that describe all corporate cultures.

While these dimensions are important elements of corporate culture, the resulting two-by-two matrix cannot easily accommodate crucial values like integrity, diversity, or psychological safety. Other models choose different dimensions and produce other cultural archetypes, but they face the same fundamental challenge. 7 No two dimensions can or should be able to capture the richness and diversity of corporate cultures that companies attempt to achieve. Trying to force diverse corporate values onto a cultural Procrustean bed, moreover, strips them of the very elements that make them distinctive.

Do Companies Walk the Talk?

More than 80% of large American corporations publish their official corporate values. But do these professed values make a difference? If a company singles out teamwork as a core value, for example, are employees more likely to collaborate with one another compared with a company in the same industry that does not include collaboration among its core values?

To address whether stated values shape employee behavior, we first measured what companies say they value. The simplest way to quantify corporate culture would be to treat each value as binary - a company either listed it as a core value or did not. When Charles Schwab lists innovation as one of four core values, it is presumably more focused on it than Quicken Loans, which includes innovation among a laundry list of 19 elements of its culture.

To quantify each company's relative focus on a value, we weighted it by the inverse of the total number of values listed. 8 So innovation was weighted at 25% for Charles Schwab and 5% for Quicken Loans. (A company that didn't list a specific value received a weighting of zero for that value.) To control for differences across sectors, we assigned each company to one of 33 industries. 9 We then ranked each company in its industry based on the weighting for each value we measured.

To assess how well companies live up to their stated values, we used data from the 2019 Culture 500, which ranks companies on nine of the most commonly cited values. Every Culture 500 company received a sentiment score that measured how positively employees talked about a specific value in the free text of their Glassdoor reviews. 10 If half the employees who discussed integrity in a company spoke about it in positive terms, for example, that company's sentiment score for integrity would be 50%.

Comparing the rankings from the Culture 500 with official corporate values allowed us to measure the correlation between them. 11 The figure below shows the correlation coefficients (with 95% confidence intervals) between official and actual values. 12 The analysis reveals that there is no correlation between the cultural values a company emphasizes in its published statements and how well the company lives up to those values in the eyes of employees. All of the correlations between official and actual values were very weak, and four of the nine - collaboration, customer orientation, execution, and diversity - were negatively correlated.

Values Should Be Actionable, Distinctive, and Linked to Results

Our research reveals a gap between official values and the cultural reality on the ground in most organizations, which raises the question of how leaders can close that gap. As a first step, leaders can communicate corporate values more effectively by providing concrete guidance on desired behavior, ensuring their organizational values are distinctive, and linking them to outcomes that matter to employees. Effective communication cannot, of course, guarantee a healthy culture on its own. But it's a good place to start.

Provide behavioral guidelines. Most employees would agree in principle that integrity, respect, and innovation are worthwhile values. They might have very different notions, however, about what these abstract terms mean in practice. Leaders can provide additional guidance by spelling out a handful of expected behaviors consistent with each value. To the extent these guidelines shape behavior across all parts of the organization, they provide a consistent framework for different functions, business units, and teams to coordinate their activities.

Biotechnology company Biogen, for example, includes pioneering among the elements of its corporate culture. Pioneering is an inspirational value to be sure, but one that employees might struggle to operationalize without further guidance. To clarify what pioneering means in practice, Biogen offers examples, including "We encourage candor to test assumptions and uncover the best ideas" and "We are open about what we do not know and ask questions to understand." (See "Behavioral Guidelines for Innovation.") Amazon and Nvidia, two of the highest-ranking companies on innovation in the Culture 500, likewise provide employees with concrete guidelines on how employees can incorporate innovation into their daily activities.

Articulate what makes your organization distinctive. A company's core values should capture its unique identity - the enduring essence of the company that distinguishes it from competitors. 13 When employees identify with a distinctive culture, they are more likely to incorporate core values in their daily activities and pursue their organization's goals. 14 A distinctive corporate culture can also differentiate an organization from competitors and provide a source of sustainable competitive advantage. 15

Unfortunately, many organizations' core values are so generic that they could easily serve as fodder for a Dilbert cartoon (there are more than 50 lampooning official culture statements). 16 The core values of pharmaceutical supplier McKesson (integrity, customer-first, excellence, respect, and accountability) could apply equally well to an airline, grocery store, or bank.

How can leaders translate common values, like customer-centricity or integrity, into something distinctive? One approach is to translate abstract values into organization-specific behavioral guidelines. Alaska Airlines and McKinsey & Co. both emphasize customer service. The specific behaviors associated with their values, however, are tailored to their respective industries and strategies. Alaska Airlines offers tactics for front-line employees dealing with passengers, such as "engage with kindness" and "offer assistance." McKinsey's guidelines, including "use our global network to deliver the best of the firm to all clients" and "build client capabilities to sustain improvement" are appropriate for a professional services company serving global clients.

The McKinsey example illustrates another way to make values distinctive - by elaborating on desired behaviors in language unique to an organization. Within McKinsey, "follow the top management approach" means thinking through an issue for the client organization as a whole, rather than its impact on a single division or function. That phrase, and others like "obligation to dissent," have been used for decades, have a well-defined meaning within the company, and constitute part of the company's distinctive legacy.

Another approach is to take common values as a given, but then highlight those elements of corporate culture that differentiate an organization. Netflix, for example, acknowledges that integrity, respect, and collaboration are important, but emphasizes five values that distinguish the company including "encourage independent decision-making by employees" and "share information openly, broadly, and deliberately."

Clarifying what your values mean in practice and providing insight into what truly differentiates your corporate culture requires hard work. Linguistic gimmicks are no substitute for effort and insight. Appending adjectives like "ferocious," "unflinching," or "relentless" will not make values more distinctive or actionable. Leaders also do well to avoid acronyms that force fit values. Would Discover Financial Services, for example, have included "volunteerism" (the "V" in its DISCOVER values) or Hilton Hotels "now" (the "N" in HILTON) if these companies went by different names?

Explain why your values matter. Official statements of culture signal what matters most to an organization, and behavioral cues provide concrete guidance on how to translate values into actions. Leaders can further clarify their organization's values and what makes them distinctive by spelling out why they matter. Of the companies that publish corporate culture statements, less than one-quarter include any discussion of how those values help the organization succeed. And most of those companies simply assert culture is a competitive advantage without explaining the link between core values and organizational performance.

A handful of companies, in contrast, explicitly spell out the connection between their culture and desired results. A common rationale links corporate culture with a company's ability to attract, retain, and energize the best employees. HubSpot - the No. 1 company on Glassdoor's list of best places to work in 2020 - explains its "culture doesn't just help attract amazing people, it amplifies their abilities and helps them do their best work." Where companies choose to publish their core values provides a clue as to why they matter. One in five companies publish values on the section of their website targeted at potential employees. Their culture statements often include values, such as respect, diversity, learning, and caring, that are attractive to many job seekers.

Nearly the same percentage of companies (18%) include core values in their code of business conduct, which, unsurprisingly, emphasizes integrity, honesty, fairness, and strict compliance with applicable laws. Deutsche Bank, for example, underscores the importance of integrity in rebuilding trust with key stakeholders: "By living these values and beliefs in daily interactions with our stakeholders, employees have a critical role to play in helping us to restore the trust lost during the financial crisis."

Companies can also spell out the link between values, behaviors, and performance. Netflix explains that employees are expected to be "extraordinarily candid with one another" because "we will learn faster and be better if we can make giving and receiving feedback less stressful and a more normal part of work life." 17 The company's value of "avoid rules" is, according to Netflix, critical to maintaining agility in the face of changing market circumstances.

Explaining the rationale behind specific values helps employees (and other stakeholders) understand why the organization prizes certain values above others. Illinois Tool Works' emphasis on decentralization and entrepreneurship is appropriate for a diversified conglomerate, for example, but would not suit a global professional services company that needs to collaborate across offices and practice groups to serve multinational clients. Clarifying the purpose of values also makes it easier to measure whether they are working. HubSpot, for example, could track attrition among employees they want to keep to assess whether their culture is doing its job.

Leaders love to talk about corporate culture. Many companies, however, display a disconnect between what leaders preach and what is practiced throughout the organization. Improving corporate culture is a long journey that demands a holistic approach and sustained effort over time. During the next year, the Culture 500 project will publish a steady stream of content exploring how leaders can build and sustain a healthy corporate culture.

As first steps in improving their culture, leaders can take a hard, evidence-based look at how well their organization is living up to its espoused values. Which elements of your culture are working well? Which are falling short? Where are the pockets of cultural excellence within your organization? Which teams are undermining your culture?

A cultural diagnostic may reveal that your values are too abstract, generic, or divorced from results to shape how employees act on a day-to-day basis. In this case, you may want to refresh your core values to make sure they capture the distinctive essence of your organization, provide concrete behavioral guidelines, and clearly link to outcomes that matter to employees.

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About the Authors

Donald Sull (@culturexinsight) is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and cofounder of CultureX. Stefano Turconi is a teaching fellow at the London Business School. Charles Sull is a cofounder of CultureX.

References

1. An earlier study of companies included in the S&P 500 index in 2011 found that 85% published corporate values on their website. See L. Guiso, P. Sapienza, and L. Zingales, "The Value of Corporate Culture," Journal of Financial Economics 117, no. 1 (2015): 60-76.

2. We identified all interviews in Harvard Business Review published between January 1990 and December 2019, and excluded anyone who was not the CEO of a for-profit organization with more than 250 employees at the time of the interview. We searched the text of the remaining interviews for mentions of culture, core values, or other phrases indicating the interviewee was discussing corporate culture.

3. W. Verbeke, M. Volgering, and M. Hessels, "Exploring the Conceptual Expansion Within the Field of Organizational Behavior: Organizational Climate and Organizational Culture," Journal of Management Studies 35, no. 3 (May 1998): 303-329 identified 54 definitions of organizational culture. For a terrific overview of the current state of corporate culture literature, see J.A. Chatman and C.A. O'Reilly, "Paradigm Lost: Reinvigorating the Study of Organizational Culture," Research in Organizational Behavior 36 (November 2016): 199-224.

4. More than 80% of the explanations of corporate culture in our sample explicitly discussed the role of corporate values as guides to behavior.

5. C.A. O'Reilly and J.A. Chatman, "Culture as Social Control: Corporations, Cults, and Commitment," Research in Organizational Behavior 18, eds. B.M. Staw and L.L. Cummings (Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1996): 166.

6. K.S. Cameron, R.E. Quinn, J. DeGraff, et al., "Competing Values Leadership: Creating Value in Organizations" (Northampton, Mass: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006).

7. T.E. Deal and A.A. Kennedy, "Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life," (New York: Penguin, 1992); R. Goffee and G. Jones, "What Holds the Modern Company Together?" Harvard Business Review 74, no. 6 (November-December 1996); and B. Groysberg, J. Lee, J. Price, and J. Yo-Jud Cheng, "The Culture Factor," Harvard Business Review 96, no. 1 (January-February 2018).

8. When weighting each value, we used the number of values we coded for each company (average of seven per company) rather than the number of values reported by the company (five per company on average). This adjustment allowed us to account for companies that incorporated multiple values into a single item in their official values statements and more accurately reflects their level of focus on any value.

9. The list of industries can be found at the Culture 500 website. Companies like Johnson & Johnson, which competes in pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and consumer goods, were assigned to multiple industries.

10. A company's sentiment score for a value was calculated as the number of reviews that discussed a value in positive terms divided by the total number of reviews that mentioned that value.

11. This analysis applied to companies that were both included in the Culture 500 and that had published official values statements. Of the 531 organizations in the 2019 Culture 500 sample, 444 (84%) had official culture statements. Some of the Culture 500 values included cultural items that we classified as distinct cultural items when coding official value statements. The Culture 500 value of agility, for example, included topics of agility, speed, entrepreneurial, change, and simplicity. In calculating the weighting of official corporate values, we consolidated those values to ensure consistency with the Culture 500 data.

12. We tested the association between officially stated values and employees' assessment of those values in practice using Pearson's rho. The correlations had a p-value less than 0.01 for agility and innovation, below 0.05 for respect, and was above 0.05 for all other values. Many companies did not list a specific value, which resulted in many tied value rankings within an industry. We used the Kendall rank correlation to calculate correlations in the presence of ties. The correlations coefficients using the two methods were virtually identical.

13. David Whetten defines organizational identity as "the central and enduring attributes of an organization that distinguish it from other organizations, " D.A. Whetten, "Albert and Whetten Revisited: Strengthening the Concept of Organizational Identity," Journal of Management Inquiry 15, no. 3 (September 2006): 219-234.

14. J.E. Dutton, J.M. Dukerich, and C.V. Harquail, "Organizational Images and Member Identification," Administrative Science Quarterly 39, no. 2 (June 1994): 239-263; and M. Riketta, and R. van Dick, "Foci of Attachment in Organizations: A Meta-analytic Comparison of the Strength and Correlates of Workgroup Versus Organizational Identification and Commitment," Journal of Vocational Behavior 67, no. 3 (December 2005): 490-510.

15. J.B. Barney, "Organizational Culture: Can It Be a Source of Sustained Competitive Advantage?" The Academy of Management Review 11, no. 3 (July 1986): 656-665.

16. A search of Dilbert cartoons produced 44 comic strips for culture and seven for core values, https://dilbert.com, accessed March 15, 2019.

17. "Netflix Culture," Netflix, accessed March 17, 2020, https://jobs.netflix.com.

i. We searched websites and annual reports between March and July 2018. We classified as corporate value statements any list of two or more items that were labeled as culture, values, principles, philosophy, norms, beliefs, creed, credo, ethos, attitudes, way, tenets, or commandments. We only included lists of items that were clearly separated from the main text of the website or document through, for example, bullet points, separate lines, item titles, etc. This allowed us to avoid subjective assessments of whether text embedded in a paragraph was discussing corporate culture. We excluded mission and vision statements that laid out an organization's desired future without specifying the values that would guide behavior.

ii. In some cases, we could not code a value based on the value title alone. Aon Hewitt, for example, listed head as one of its core values. In these cases, we read the value description (if available) to identify what the company meant. If the explanation included more than one value, we coded for all of these. In the Aon Hewitt example, head was described as "Integrity and professionalism are the pillars of our business. Our commitment to rigorous standards and innovation assures clients of bespoke valued solutions," which we coded to four values (integrity, professionalism, innovation, and customer orientation).

iii. Our list is broadly consistent with the Organizational Culture Profile, a compendium of corporate values widely used by management scholars that lists more than 60 distinct values. In the late 1980s, the development of the Organizational Culture Profile (OCP) summarized the most common values found in academic and managerial writing at that time. C.A. O'Reilly, J. Chatman, and D.F. Caldwell, "People and Organizational Culture: A Profile Comparison Approach to Assessing Person-Organization Fit," Academy of Management Journal 34, no. 3 (September 1991): 487-516. In a later study, they added 10 new value statements that did not appear in the original OCP, mostly dealing with customer orientation (three) and integrity (three). C.A. O'Reilly, D.F. Caldwell, J.A. Chatman, et al., "The Promise and Problems of Organizational Culture: CEO Personality, Culture, and Firm Performance," Group and Organization Management 39, no. 6 (December 2014): 595-625. Seventy-five percent of the values listed by companies we studied were also included among the superset of OCP values enumerated by O'Reilly and Chatman across their two studies.

iv. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the retail trade sector and accommodation and food services sector together employed over 30 million employees in 2018 versus a total employed population of 161 million.

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When It Comes to Culture, Does Your Company Walk the Talk?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
See All Articles in This Section When Johnson & Johnson's CEO codified the company's principles into a credo in 1943, corporate value statements were a novelty. Today they are ubiquitous among large corporations. In our study of nearly 700 large companies, we found that more than 80% published an official set of corporate values on their website.

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Responses to 10 Common Criticisms of Anti-Racism Action in STEM

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Responses to 10 Common Criticisms of Anti-Racism Action in STEM

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Also available at: antiracisminstem.wordpress.com

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Build a Scientific Identity

More opportunities to develop a scientific identity are needed to increase the number of Black scientists and engineers. Developing a scientific identify is a predictor of who will continue on to graduate school in STEM ( https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.17-04-0066). The first step to building a scientific identity is being aware of STEM communities you may aspire to join. I was fortunate to learn about and be exposed to research in bioinformatics early on during undergrad. This, along with academic mentorship, enabled me to pursue a concentration in bioinformatics for my Bachelor of Science.

But I often felt uncertain I belonged in STEM. This experience is common among Black students who report finding it hard to position themselves and be seen by others as authentically scientific ( https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.20237). For me, participating in summer research during high school and undergrad and the training experience in graduate school helped overcome such uncertainties. The early-summer research provided the catalyst for awareness of STEM communities, and the later training provided the collegiality and mentorship to help me see myself as part of a community of scholars.

Organizing summer programs that help students build a scientific identity is not a new idea, and many strong programs with high-quality research experiences and mentorship exist. My hope is that pathways to such opportunities for Black students, in a variety of STEM areas, will grow in number to foster and increase scientific aspirations among Black students.

It's up to the Faculty

I am a tenured associate professor at the University of Washington running a research group in RNA synthetic biology. I benefited from terrific advisors in graduate school (Jack W. Szostak at Harvard) and as a postdoc (Jay D. Keasling at UC Berkeley). At UW , I have had smart, hardworking students and postdocs and great collaborators, and I've been the lead PI on > $5M of NSF , DOE , and industry grants. I love the work we're doing, and it's going very well. Many more Black people could thrive as academics. Here are three changes faculty could make that would really help:

Use better ways to evaluate impact. Research shows that typical measures for evaluating teaching (student evaluations) and research (e.g., citation counts, speaking invitations) are imprecise and routinely undervalue women and minorities. The continued overreliance on these biased measures is demoralizing-and possibly illegal. We should use approaches that are more rigorous and fairer for everyone.

Make diversifying science and engineering everyone's job. It's an old saw, but the task too often falls to already-overburdened women and minorities.

Senior researchers should hold institutions, journals, and funding agencies accountable. Recently, my PhD advisor joined 14 others in resigning from the board of Angewandte Chemie to protest an anti-diversity screed it published. Imagine if everyone showed this kind of conviction!

Representation and Allyship

I am a Black Man from the Lowcountry of South Carolina. Even though my county is mostly Black, I did not have a Black teacher until middle school. From kindergarten until I earned my Ph.D., I only had one African American teacher in the sciences. This lack of representation is suffocating to young minds who are already on the fringes of science. At Virginia State University, a historically black university (HBCU), I met my first Black science teacher. He planted the seed of " If he's a scientist, maybe I can be one too." Representation is power.

I completed my M.S., Ph.D., and postdoc while seeing few students and no professors that looked like me. I soon realized that I could make an impact by cultivating intellectuals at a HBCU. This led me to teach at Delaware State University where I develop research and programs that help employ students as scientists or go on to earn graduate degrees.

However, this is not enough. No social change has happened in this country without the help of White allies. Allyship is recommending a Black researcher to chair a session at a conference. It's suggesting a Black reviewer on journal submissions. It's inviting a Black speaker to give a talk. These actions lead to opportunities that produce successful tenure packages. These scientists then become flames that attract young scientists to do it too. In short, we must open the door wider and actively welcome young Black scholars to enter academia while embracing and supporting our Black scholars who are already in the room. We are here. Find us.

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What Needs to Change in Academia to Increase the Number of Black Scientists and Engineers?

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I am a firm believer in the power of mentorship and sponsorship. I also recognize that there are cultural barriers around these practices that make it sometimes difficult to do this in a multicultural setting, but mentorship is an essential component in investing in the success of our trainees.

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In this thought-provoking documentary, scholars, activists and politicians analyze the criminalization of African Americans and the U.S. prison boom. Watch trailers & learn more.

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How racial bias works -- and how to disrupt it | Jennifer L. Eberhardt

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ACTIVISM. SOCIAL JUSTICE. CULTURE. POLITICS.

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Episode 5

Interracial couple and gold medalists, Lindsey Vonn & P.K Subban, join Rachel Lindsay (the first black bachelorette) & her husband Bryan Abasolo to have an Uncomfortable Conversation about interracial dating and the backlash that has come with it. Lindsey Vonn speaks about fighting for acceptance from black women, as Rachel confesses to formerly being that ignorant judgmental woman.

Watch Episode

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Interracial couple and gold medalists, Lindsey Vonn & P.K Subban, join Rachel Lindsay (the first black bachelorette) & her husband Bryan Abasolo to have an Uncomfortable Conversation about interracial dating and the backlash that has come with it. Lindsey Vonn speaks about fighting for acceptance from black women, as Rachel confesses to formerly being that ignorant judgmental woman.

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Listen to ‘1619,’ a Podcast From The New York Times (Published 2020)

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An audio series on how slavery has transformed America, connecting past and present through the oldest form of storytelling.

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Why all Americans should honor Juneteenth

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with Andrew Ti and Tawny Newsome

Yo, Is This Racist?, hosted by Andrew Ti, creator of the popular blog of the same name, is now a weekly podcast! Every Wednesday, Ti, co-host Tawny Newsome, and their guests answer questions from fan-submitted voicemails and emails about whether or not something is, in fact, racist.
Looking for the archives? All episodes older than 6 months can be found exclusively on Stitcher Premium, ad-free. Go to stitcher.com/premium and use promo code EARWOLF for 1 month free (and $5 off the annual plan!)

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with Andrew Ti and Tawny Newsome Yo, Is This Racist?, hosted by Andrew Ti, creator of the popular blog of the same name, is now a weekly podcast! Every Wednesday, Ti, co-host Tawny Newsome, and their guests answer questions from fan-submitted voicemails and emails about whether or not something is, in fact, racist.

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How Southern socialites rewrote Civil War history

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Bigotry is untended ignorance.

To approach the overwhelming gulf in the lived experience between Americans from different backgrounds, it takes a lifetime of work, patience and empathy. For many Americans, if serious conversations about race happen at all, they may do so with family and friends. About two-thirds of Black and Asian Americans report talking often or sometimes about race, compared to half of white and Latinx people. But it's still a rare conversation at work.

That needs to change.

This month is Racial Equity Month in Technical.ly's editorial calendar, a topic that has coincided with one of the most consequential moments in the history of American racial equity: A gruesome video of a white police officer in Minneapolis killing a Black man named George Floyd sparked a week of protests around the country, indeed the world, from tens of thousands in big cities to inspiring gatherings in small towns.

Though the spark is painfully familiar - the killing of a Black man by police - it has proven a flashpoint. No workplace can ignore this moment, and no workplace should ever ignore this issue.

That's why on this week's episode of The TWIJ Show from Technical.ly, a weekly interview series on building better companies, we're discussing: How do you talk about race at work?

I spoke to two advisers at Philadelphia-based diversity consulting firm Cultured Enuf, including President Jael K.D.L.V. Chambers and diversity and inclusion trainer Alyssa Vásquez.

Assess your foundation.

How comfortably race can be discussed at any given workplace can range widely, from freely to rarely to toxically.

"A lot of leaders hop into an uncomfortable issue without setting the table for having psychological safety," said Chambers. When Cultured Enuf works with a client, they begin with a "diversity audit," assessing the team's history, relationships and dynamics.

Whether you're a CEO, an HR professional, a team manager or an individual contributor, it is important first to understand the environment or context any conversation might take place. This is simpler, if still sensitive, if your organization already has dialogue about race and complex systems. If this is rare, it will take time, no matter your own background or experience.

If you're a white organizational leader thinking about to address your team now, or during other flashpoints on race, start here.

Do the work. Invest in relationships.

The secret here is starting small with what always goes into relationships: consistently asking about and learning about the lives of your coworkers, not when there is a national crisis, but always.

White professionals, do not look to your Black coworkers, or other people of color, for advice or guidance. Read a book, take a course, consume the rich resources online. Educate yourself. Work with a paid expert. Get comfortable engaging with challenging material on the topic of race with likeminded friends.

Professionals of color, if you want to start a conversation at your organization, do what feels most comfortable for you. If you have a coworker you feel comfortable talking about race, do so. But if you're being asked, formally or informally, to be a guide about race, do not feel forced.

Chambers advises, "It is OK to say, 'At this moment I don't have the capacity to explain this; can the company bring someone in to discuss this?'"

A good assessment of how serious an organization is to engage with this work is whether the CEO and other organizational leaders have gone on their own journeys.

"Can those leaders name their privilege? Do they understand there is learning? Are you willing to challenge structure?" said Chambers.

If this is truly important to you, start early and don't put it off. Some say, "when my company gets bigger, I will address these issues - but instead you are creating your values now, you're building your culture now, so when you get bigger it is not a problem later," said Chambers. It's a lot harder when you have 15 employees or 50 or 500 or 1,000 employees.

Look for courses or resources, like an anti-racism seminar for white professionals.

There're 21 days until the "Introduction to Being an Antiracist" virtual event, you can use the link in this thread to register 👇🏾, please use this time to prepare yourself for the journey ahead by taking the 21 Day Challenge pic.twitter.com/8D1OQ56lUS

- Kim Crayton [She/Her] 🏢 💻🎙#causeascene (@KimCrayton1) June 6, 2020

Be vulnerable. Hold empathy.

For all the preparation, talking about race begins by talking about anything difficult or complex: It requires, space, relationships and empathy.

"People don't realize how triggering the 'How was your weekend' can be," said Chambers. For a professional disengaged in, for example, the George Floyd protests, that question might be alarming for those who are involved. That can make for tense circumstances whenever a conversation about race comes up.

Vásquez notes that talking about race is often difficult for people of all backgrounds for different reasons. Professionals need to recognize and name that when confronting the topic.

"Be vulnerable. It is not a sign of weakness," she said. If you don't feel comfortable talking about race, say so. Listen.

"A lot of leaders make themselves [out to be] better than who they are," said Chambers.

A familiar trap for professionals is to want to be seen as expert on something as important as race and cultural competency, setting themselves up for failure.

"Most white people have never talked about race, they have no experience in it. [Naming that weakness] can take the pressure off that people have to be perfect. You can correct when I'm wrong," he said. "We have not humanized this. These are real people who don't always feel cared for and supported. Psychological safety first."

Set goals.

"When you understand your own lack of experience, you can work backward" toward what you want to be able to address, said Vásquez.

This is going to be different for different organizations. The highest-level goals include topics like pay equity and expecting an organization's leadership and team resemble the communities they serve. Comparing the retention rates of employees from different races is important. To get there, creating a safe, productive and honest working environment is key.

Every company should likely have something like a diversity task force that is always setting, working toward and resetting three-year goals, said Chambers. His firm helps set and monitor these. This is easier when leadership is fully engaged.

If professionals are energized by this but their leaders aren't yet, it isn't hopeless.

"You can hold your leaders accountable," Chambers said. "There are things you can do at any level. We have more power than we think."

His point is to look at your team, your department, your area of expertise: What is your responsibility?

If you're an employee who sets a goal of a specific kind of engagement from your employer, look for guidance. For example, find a template here of ways to engage an employer around racial justice.

Plan for follow-through.

The rush for an all-team town hall to address some national moment is likely a mistake if it isn't a routine part of your organizational culture. It's important to use the authentic culture already embedded in your organization, said Vásquez.

Beyond a conversation, "can you put resources behind this?" noted Vásquez.

If your organization is ill-equipped for moments such as today, that likely is a sign that substantial work needs to be done. Staff conversations, like during service projects or other safe spaces, help. Trainings do, too, but "training doesn't change behavior, it gives knowledge," said Chambers.

Beyond a base set of information for all staff, he prefers optional trainings to see who wants to put in the work. Transparent goals are crucial. But it will come down to where you stand.

Pay employees to do real work, fund trainings and take a stand when you can lose money, said Chambers. More and more employees will be loyal to organizations that back issues like racial justice, and will lose passion for those that don't. But this will never be a one-and-done situation, said Vásquez.

The work is important, but you just can't fake this, she said: "It all comes back to relationships."

https://technical.ly/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Technical.ly-Interview_-How-Do-I-Talk-about-Race-at-Work_-2020-06-08-at-13_18-GMT-7.mp3

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How do I talk about race at work? - Technical.ly

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Bigotry is untended ignorance. To approach the overwhelming gulf in the lived experience between Americans from different backgrounds, it takes a lifetime of work, patience and empathy. For many Americans, if serious conversations about race happen at all, they may do so with family and friends.

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As the world erupts with demands for racial justice, the chemistry community has the obligation, opportunity and momentum to drive for diversity and inclusion in the sciences. Efforts towards that end must begin by allocating opportunities for success on the basis of potential, not privilege, and follow through by soliciting and acting upon feedback from the scholars we have recruited.

The heterogeneity of chemists across ethnic, gender and socio-economic spectrums has significance at every echelon, from the young students first discovering the periodic table to the entrepreneurs launching their pharmaceutical startups. Although our scientific community is increasingly engaged in honest dialogue surrounding diversity and inclusion - particularly after the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd - efforts to increase diversity through admissions and hiring have historically focused on meeting racial and gender quotas rather than evaluating candidates holistically. That is, academic programmes can exhibit tokenism by recruiting a few members from under-represented groups in order to meet the lowest standard of diversity, rather than to expand the institution's analytical skillset and capacity for community engagement. Moreover, compared with the time and resources that we expend to recruit scientists from under-represented groups in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), far less attention is given to also creating a work environment that respects all individuals and embraces their feedback. As a result, retention of under-represented scientists constitutes a major challenge in academia.

"academic programmes can exhibit tokenism by recruiting a few members from under-represented groups in order to meet the lowest standard of diversity"

What will it take to make our undergraduate and graduate researchers, our postdoctoral interview candidates, our faculty and our academic leaders reflect local and global populations - and why should we bother? As a melting pot of aspiring innovators, it is both our extraordinary privilege and our duty to answer these questions. We work in a research group whose expertise in enriching functional nucleic acids from a starting pool of trillions of random sequences has, oddly, provided us with a unique perspective on how to select, retain and invest in the potential of would-be members of our own chemistry community. While our experiences are mostly grounded in the American academic system, here we present general insights on how to recruit diverse groups of people, provide them with the resources to flourish and support them in dreaming big.

Assessing candidates

"if biases (explicit or implicit) are present at each career stage, these accumulate over time to exponentially skew candidate pools"

"Does our programme have what it takes for this person to be successful?"

Origins of exclusivity

"Not seeing others who look like us engenders feelings of exclusion and negative thoughts such as, "Am I here by mistake? What if I don't succeed?""

Cultivating inclusion

"when someone is describing an experience foreign to us, that is the time to ask questions, develop a deeper understanding and empathize"

Outlook

Acknowledgements

Author information

Ethics declarations

Additional information

About this article

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As the world erupts with demands for racial justice, the chemistry community has the obligation, opportunity and momentum to drive for diversity and inclusion in the sciences. Efforts towards that end must begin by allocating opportunities for success on the basis of potential, not privilege, and follow through by soliciting and acting upon feedback from the scholars we have recruited.

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Black academics are calling out racism in science, recounting behaviours ranging from overt acts to micro-aggressions, using social-media hashtags such as #BlackInTheIvory.

A study in April highlighted how students from under-represented groups innovate more than their white male counterparts do - but receive few to no career benefits from their discoveries because their contributions are often overlooked.

Nature spoke to six Black academic researchers about the effects of racism on their careers, their advice to white colleagues and their thoughts on meaningful institutional actions.

White colleagues have the power to change the system
Vashan Wright, a geophysicist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Massachusetts.
Before I started my undergraduate programme, I thought a university campus was a magical place. I thought I'd be treated not on the basis of my skin colour, but according to how smart I was and my efforts to make the world a better place. This view changed when I saw a Confederate flag flying on my campus - the first time I'd seen one in real life. It changed when someone used a racial epithet against me and threatened to kill me.

Black academic success happens despite systemic racism and bias. It's hard to tell whether dismissive body language is bias. It's hard to tell why my first paper was in limbo for ten months and rejected without review. It's hard to tell whether people's faces are expressing surprise at my ideas, or at the fact that those ideas are coming from someone who is Black. It's those quiet things that eat away at you.

In March, I started a postdoc at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts, which I had visited a couple of times as a PhD student. But I haven't physically been there in my new position because of the coronavirus. I enjoyed earning a PhD in a laboratory with a diverse range of students at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and I'll miss that environment, but I appreciate that WHOI formed a committee for diversity and inclusion and a partnership-education programme to foster a culture of inclusivity.

More recently, Hendratta Ali, a geoscientist at Fort Hays State University in Kansas, and colleagues crafted an anti-racist action plan for geoscience societies. It calls for them to collect scientifically valid data on diversity, equity and inclusion, to publish accountability reports and to ensure that diversity and racial justice are discussed at well-attended events.

Still, the geosciences are one of the least diverse disciplines in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. I sometimes worry that I'll never be able to recreate the diverse environment that I enjoyed during my PhD, but I am committed to that vision as I advance in my career.

Some white faculty members don't want to acknowledge that Black students experience racism. They don't necessarily deny your experiences, but they often look for another explanation to try to protect you. A faculty member of colour knows that they cannot protect you from it.

Scientific communities need to decide where, and for what, they stand by asking their members: what message are you sending if you are not actively being anti-racist and trying to change the system?

I say to my white colleagues: you have the most power in the geosciences; you benefit the most from racism and lack of diversity. It is therefore your job to fix the system. But I'll help you.

Create opportunities for difficult conversations
Nikea Pittman, a structural biologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
My university and its diversity and inclusivity committee have released messages of support for the Black community following the protests in the wake of George Floyd's death, but it can feel like there's a lot of silence beyond those messages. It's hard for a Black person to initiate conversations around this topic because of a fear of coming across as aggressive, especially when those conversations might not be welcome. In early June, two white male colleagues (not in my lab) discussed the protests, standing two feet away from me, while I pretended not to be hurt by the exclusion.

Almost two weeks later, one of the youngest graduate students in my lab suggested we have a group conversation about race. I intentionally didn't open my mouth until everyone else had spoken. I hadn't heard what my colleagues think about these issues, and it was easier for me to open up once it became apparent that everyone wanted to know how to be an ally to the Black community. If your lab hasn't had this conversation yet, you can still have it - and it can make a big difference.

I've been waiting for more than a decade to hear non-Black people be outraged at the way Black people are treated in the United States, and was hopeful that we could collectively mourn. Even though it's not my responsibility, I want to help make these conversations easier. But I don't always know how to proceed. I jumped on a bandwagon of Black academics on social media who are volunteering to support younger colleagues who feel alone. We need collaboration in academia to tackle these problems. Black scientists can't carry the burden on their own.

Universities can help faculty members to learn how to bridge difficult conversations, and to acknowledge the emotional burden of systemic racism. Department heads can encourage their faculty members to initiate and maintain these discussions with their teams.

At the institutional level, so much of the diversity conversation right now is focused on recruiting more students of colour and finding ways to support them once they arrive. And that's important, but it's a very different question from the one that the Black community is struggling with right now: we're asking what we can do to prevent the next instance of police brutality. I saw that the University of Minnesota had severed a contract with the city's police department, which had provided patrols at large campus events, because of concerns about violence. Those are bold, immediate actions that get to the root of the problem.

On social media, I saw medical students at the University of Washington in Seattle initiate an anti-racism summer-reading programme. I really hope that tenured white faculty members will do the research, too, and be able to say: "I've learned how racism, discrimination and implicit bias affect my Black colleagues." And then they will realize at the next faculty meeting that they can start conversations that their Black colleagues cannot start without putting their career on the line.

Commit to bold hiring targets
Mark Richards, a physicist at Imperial College London.
It's quite easy for a Black person in the United Kingdom to relate to underlying issues of racism in the United States. Heavy-handed policing is not new to our Black community. Like most people around the world, we are experiencing sadness, anger and frustration.

Being one of the few Black academics in my field and at this university, I feel a level of responsibility to do what I can to nurture and inspire the next generation. To be a good ally, it's not quite enough to be neutral. You have to be anti-racist when necessary. Racism is like a virus - attitudes spread when they are validated. To kill the racism virus, you have to distance yourself from that ideology so that eventually there is nowhere for it to be transmitted. The best way to combat white supremacy is to focus on Black excellence.

Until recently, many institutions didn't feel there was a problem. They lamented that no Black students were applying, but a 'what can we do?' attitude prevailed for many years. I think that institutions must look at their data to shed light on whether they are being institutionally racist. If a university is located in the centre of a huge city with a high Black population living locally, but has only a minuscule number of Black students, that has to tell you something.

At Imperial College London, we have been trying for 15 years to address a shortage of Black students and those from other under-represented groups, through an advisory group called Imperial as One. Yet representation of people from all minority ethnic groups remains low here, at less than 10%. The problem will not be solved simply by employing more faculty members of colour. We have to actually attract students from under-represented groups. Imperial did something decisive and made a commitment to double its intake of students from under-represented groups over the next five years. The push to achieve this goal is due to start this autumn. I hope other academic institutions will replicate these types of action.

Beyond the basics of simply treating all people as equals, enough data exists to show that diverse teams are more productive. Posing the question, "Is your university being as diverse as it could be?" is essentially the same as asking, "Is the university being as productive as it could be?" What leader doesn't want to ask that question?

Consider 'cluster hiring'
Kishana Taylor, a virologist at the University of California, Davis.
I met my postdoc adviser, virologist Sam Díaz-Muñoz, in 2017 at a Twitter meet-up, at a conference organized by the American Society for Microbiology in New Orleans, Louisiana. At the end of the conversation, he asked me to apply for a job in his new lab at the University of California (UC), Davis.

My PhD experience, at the University of Georgia in Athens, had dealt a blow to my self-esteem. I was the only Black graduate student in a department with no Black professors. I was by myself, in terms of representation, in a state where Black people make up 30% of the population. When I met my postdoc adviser, I hadn't yet published anything and had no confidence that I would be competitive. Had he not contacted me a second time, I would not have pursued that position.

During my PhD programme, between 2013 and 2018, high-profile shootings of unarmed Black people - notably Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, who was just 12 years old, and Michael Brown - prompted a number of criminal trials, but none secured convictions. I'd come into the lab feeling heavy and upset after these deaths. No one noticed. I tried to talk about my feelings to a staff member, who told me not to get too upset because we didn't know what had happened. I learnt quickly to not even bother trying to have those conversations.

I was going to leave science after my PhD unless I found a lab that valued diversity. Although I found a principal investigator who does, my department at UC Davis doesn't have any Black professors. Academic institutions need to take actions instead of just saying they value students from under-represented minority groups. We need more scientists of colour in leadership positions.

Practices such as 'cluster hiring', which can be used to diversify faculties, have been tried at a number of universities and should get more attention. With cluster hiring, universities advertise multiple faculty positions at once, but don't always stipulate specific fields; this can improve the odds that candidates from under-represented minority groups will be selected, making it easier for them to fit in if they are. It's infinitely more lonely, and harder to adjust, if someone is the only Black person to be hired in a department. For example, the entire University of Maryland system has a US National Science Foundation grant to create a pre-professoriate pipeline, hiring transitional postdocs with the intent of bringing them in as faculty members in a year or two.

It's important for white colleagues to ask themselves whether they'd be comfortable walking into a room full of Black or Latin American people - and then to imagine what it's like for us when, every day of our lives, we have to enter rooms full of only white people. My biggest pet peeve is when white colleagues, who do research for a living, ask me for advice on how to be an ally without having done any research. It's not hard to find journal articles that detail the impact of diversity, equity and inclusivity initiatives.

Create a welcoming environment
Henry Henderson, a cancer biologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee.
I trained at Tuskegee University in Alabama, a historically Black university, where everyone looked like me. But I started to question whether I wanted to continue in academia when I went to national conferences and saw so few people of colour. Yet I realized that, if I stepped out, it would decrease the chances for someone else who looked like me to climb the academic ladder.

At Vanderbilt, I am one of two Black postdocs on a floor with at least ten labs. It reminds me that there's still a lot to do. We have programmes to support diversity and inclusion, but that's not enough. I've experienced microaggressions. At a poster presentation at a large meeting, every question I got asked was, "Who did all this work?", even though I was first author. It's not unusual for white colleagues to insinuate that people of colour are in certain programmes only because their research is being supported by supplementary grants for members of minority groups. If you create opportunities, honour the policy in place to increase diversity.

When I come to the lab in the evening, I am usually followed by campus police from the parking complex to the building, and they ask to see my badge but let white people go right by. I'm used to that from city police. My mother wants me to wear my ID badge everywhere I go, in the hope that it will keep me safe.

I had considered leaving academia several times. My current principal investigator, oncologist Christine Lovly, saved me. She strives to foster opportunities, and puts me in leadership roles - inviting me, for example, into a group focused on health disparities in cancer - so that I can have a voice and gain experience promoting dialogue in areas relevant to my research. This approach took me by surprise at first. I wondered whether she was overworking me, but she wanted to increase my impact in spaces that I otherwise wouldn't be in. She's encouraged me to apply for a US National Institutes of Health grant, even though I was hesitant because of the gap between success rates for white and African American applicants. I wouldn't be on Twitter if it weren't for her. She saw that I wanted to diversify science, and created this postdoc opportunity so that I could reach back and pull others up, too.

Creating a welcoming environment is very different from inviting Black people to university functions, academic programmes and professional society meetings simply to increase the number of us. We can tell when we're here to be here as opposed to being tokenized. In a welcoming space, we are asked to speak at talks, to offer input, to collaborate and to lead projects.

I worry that there are periods during which society is outraged by racism, only for everything to go back to the way it was within a couple of months. We need a continuous effort to improve racial diversity in science and medicine. Institutions should create more programmes that emphasize not only diversity, but also the retention of Black students in the scientific pipeline, including support throughout their education. I have six nephews who are all interested in science because of me. Imagine if there were more Black academics. How many other kids would be inspired?

Make hiring for leadership posts more transparent
Abdulhakim Abdi, a physical geographer at Lund University, Sweden.
I came to Sweden in 2012 to get a PhD at Lund. Before that, I worked as a geographic-information systems specialist at the Lamont-Doherty Observatory in New York City. There, Robin Bell, the head of the research group and the current president of the American Geophysical Union, created an environment where everybody's voice was heard and respected. That encouraged me to pursue a PhD and to ask my own research questions.

At the same time, I experienced overt racism in the United States while exploring the outdoors as a bird watcher. I grew up in Abu Dhabi and started observing birds when I was 14. After I moved to the United States at the age of 21, for my undergraduate degree, I had to explain to police at least half a dozen times that I was simply outside watching birds. The police weren't aggressive, but they told me that I was making people uncomfortable and that I had to move along. So, for the rest of the 11 years that I was in the United States, I stopped bird-watching. Here in Sweden, people might give me strange looks when I'm outdoors, but they don't say anything or call the police. In everyday encounters here, it can be difficult to discern whether people are being racist or whether they are simply introverted culturally.

The student body is pretty diverse in universities across Sweden, but less so in the upper echelons. I'm worried about the lack of transparency in hiring and promotion decisions. What goes on behind closed doors? These problems were detailed in a 2018 report on the prevalence of nepotism in Swedish academia.

As the report suggested, a combination of increased funding, to help alleviate universities' reliance on hiring 'safe bets', and greater transparency in hiring should reduce nepotism and hopefully eliminate it. Swedish institutions have strong gender-equality programmes, as they should. But there are no programmes that open the higher echelons of academia to qualified and capable researchers from the country's recognized minority groups; these include the Sami and the Roma, as well as other established communities such as people from Iraq and Somalia.

Still, when I was offered a position in the United States soon after I earned my PhD, I decided to stay here with my family - it made more sense financially because we have subsidized day care and health care.

I think every university should create an ecosystem where Black scientists and those from other minority groups feel comfortable. Academics need to let go of the myth that they have no biases. They need to respect Black people's opinions and invite Black and minority-ethnic academics to be co-authors of papers. And they need to expand their networks to create opportunities for colleagues from under-represented groups.

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What Black scientists want from colleagues and their institutions

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Black academics are calling out racism in science, recounting behaviours ranging from overt acts to micro-aggressions, using social-media hashtags such as #BlackInTheIvory. A study in April highlighted how students from under-represented groups innovate more than their white male counterparts do - but receive few to no career benefits from their discoveries because their contributions are often overlooked.

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We're having hard conversations about racial justice in corporate America and academia right now. We have seen a flurry of company statements about diversity amid nationwide protests supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. Will these conversations yield anything?

Our research, personal stories, and the experiences of many others don't offer much cause for optimism. Why? When people of color give voice to the discrimination they experience, they are often silenced by their white colleagues, many of whom purport to be liberal progressives. And although there is a perception that academia is a safe haven for these kinds of honest conversations, it is often the opposite. Until this changes in education and beyond, it's our view that we will be unable to reach racial equity in white institutional spaces.

We know firsthand what it means to be part of a white academic institution - we write as scholars of color who have committed a lifetime to anti-racism and cross-racial alliances. The two of us bonded and built a friendship over our shared experiences with racial hostility in the workplace. In this article, we want to share our personal stories and some of the relevant research to identify some of the common themes that underpin what silencing and sidelining looks like, especially from white progressive colleagues. We believe that our personal experiences - along with the experiences of so many others - will help illustrate the barriers still in place for how we talk about, analyze and take action around racial justice.

The Burdens of Invisible Labor and the "Inclusion Tax"

Tsedale's research focuses on how race, gender, class, diversity, and workplace inequality play a major role in the professional experiences of women of color. Her book, You Don't Look Like a Lawyer: Black Women and Systemic Gendered Racism, specifically examines how race and gender impact the career trajectories of Black women lawyers. In it, she describes the concept of the invisible labor clause, which is the added "invisible labor" marginalized groups are required to perform in order to navigate their daily existence within social and professional spaces. She also introduces the inclusion tax concept to describe the additional resources "spent," such as time, money, and emotional and cognitive energy, just to adhere to the norms in these white spaces - all of which contributes to the silencing of people of color in white institutional spaces. Their competence is questioned daily in ways that their white counterparts are not. And Black women are often made to bear the brunt of doing the diversity work in order to have their organizations perceived as progressive.

Angie's work has included research into how women and faculty of color teach about racism. She addresses invisible labor in terms of the added burden faculty of color face in teaching their courses and taking on the disproportionate level of mentoring students of color. Faculty of color dedicate a great deal of time preparing for and managing student resistance to their teaching, but that work is rarely recognized in tenure and promotion decisions. In fact, this added labor takes away from writing and publishing, which, in turn, hurts their tenure and promotion chances.

Angie, like Tsedale, has also found that people of color are pressured to conform and manage their emotions to suit the comfort of white people, often as a means of professional survival. Faculty of color may feel pressure to remain silent about injustice or inequalities until they are tenured or promoted. Furthermore, faculty who have faced hostility in departments tend to withdraw from department functions or resign. White colleagues may resort to criticizing these faculty of color for not being engaged or interacting with them. Again, this can have very real consequences on tenure and promotion.

Black women are significantly underrepresented in academic departments, as well as across various industries. As a Black woman traversing academia, Tsedale has experienced how white people, many of whom may consider themselves progressive, devalue Black bodies. When she was about seven months pregnant, she had a troubling encounter with an older white male faculty member. On an elevator filled with students, he saw her pregnant belly and said: "Oh my God, Why? Your life is going to be over. Come on!" This remark reinforces sociologist Adia Harvey Wingfield's concept of systemic gendered racism. Wingfield argues that Joe R. Feagin's concept of a white racial frame - a dominant white perspective that only sees things from a white point of view, including ideologies, images, stereotypes, assumptions, and racialized narratives that posit whites as superior to people of color, thereby reinforcing white privilege and power and maintaining racial inequality (although people of color can also adopt this frame) - is also gendered.

Systemic gendered racism denotes that there is an inextricable linkage of race and gender that leads to differentiated outcomes. Black women therefore experience racial and gendered domination in ways that are unique to their social identity. What Tsedale had to do next is an example of the invisible labor Black women have to perform as a result - she had to directly address the racialized and gendered nature of his attack. This was not just a careless remark in an elevator. All of these everyday interactions add up to an exhausting burden on people of color.

Angie is Korean-American and grew up in a predominantly white community where she was called a "chink" and harassed on a daily basis. The discrimination she has experienced - from watching her mother be mocked for her accent to being taunted, bullied, and physically attacked by white neighbors and classmates - exacerbated her instinct to remain silent so as not to risk further antagonizing anyone. Some of Angie's experiences with white colleagues, many of whom call themselves progressives, have included everything from being asked what her ethnicity is during interviews, being referred to as a "favorite food," to being told her personal and professional experiences do not matter because she is not Black, to being sexually harassed by faculty who have told her they like Asian women.

The emotional and cognitive energy Angie has exerted to deal with daily, racialized aggressions from her white colleagues is part of her invisible labor. That's often prevented her from engaging fully with her department and feeling like a valued member of her academic community. Like many other faculty of color, she has to spend extra time and effort to ensure that her reputation, as well as her work, is not derailed.

Racism-Evasive Rhetoric

Angie studies liberal ideology and how it contributes to organizational silences on racism. She argues that external racial ideologies of "color-blindness" interact with internal organizational cultures to produce something called racism-evasive responses. Racism-evasive rhetoric denies naming and addressing the significance and realities of racism. Examples include: emotional responses, such as crying, to deflect from hard conversations; using African Americans as color capital; the performance of sending white children to racially diverse schools as a way to deflect from problematic or racist behavior; and claiming special insights due to traveling the world or having intermarried. In Angie's experience, all of these racism-evasive tactics have surfaced in everything from departmental discussions about racism to cynicism and incredulity about her research on the experiences of faculty of color.

When discussions of systemic and institutional racism do happen, white people often want to run the conversation. In her forthcoming book, Angie names this phenomenon " liberal white supremacy " - the tendency of white people to constantly place themselves in the superior moral position. This takes many forms. Some want to compete for the title of most "woke" progressive. Some show up to insert themselves in conversations about racial and economic inequality only when it becomes popular or high-profile to do so.

In line with Angie's research, Tsedale has experienced how white colleagues use racism-evasive tactics to avoid engaging issues that push Black voices from the margins to the center. One such incident occurred when Tsedale was working towards incorporating more diverse programming for academics and practitioners in her field. To her dismay, her ideas were met with skepticism by a white liberal colleague for actively promoting too many voices of leading Black scholars. This colleague was concerned that the event, which traditionally centers white academics, would turn into a "Black thing." This staved off the centering of Black voices in a predominately white organization, while simultaneously silencing Tsedale. One of the worst parts of this interaction is that this white liberal colleague would probably never imagine herself to be participating in anti-black racism-evasive tactics.

Defining Who Gets to Be An Ally

Angie's experiences differ from her African American colleagues, but the issue that unites them is that none of them share in white privilege. Angie has had strong African and Asian American mentors, who supported her scholarship, but also listened empathetically to her experiences with racial discrimination and helped her combat it. These mentors of color never denied her experiences or claim that they did not matter. That is a level of disrespect Angie has only encountered from her white, presumably progressive colleagues.

When Angie united with African Americans in a people of color caucus to address racism in academia, her white colleagues responded by questioning her racial identity and her right to these associations - questions her Black colleagues never asked. Some of her white colleagues have gone so far as to tell her Black colleagues that she is an "honorary white" and should not be allied with them. This behavior is another example of liberal white supremacy. White faculty are dictating which people of color are allowed to share connections while failing to recognize their own racial status and privilege as white. These divisive acts further silence and control people of color.

Angie has found that her white colleagues often react with denial when she discusses the racist bullying, harassment, and trauma she has faced as a person of color. They discourage her from talking about how this trauma informs her teaching and research on racism, anti-blackness, and why academic departments have an obligation to address racial hostility. They certainly seem to like her better when she is a silent model minority sharing her bulgogi recipe.

Going forward, we need to redefine both who gets to be an ally and what that role means - in part, to recognize that the assumptions and biases that preserve white spaces are reproduced over and over by the same white faculty who argue that racial equity is part of their narrative. In our view, it is not.

Normalizing White Experiences

Another point of convergence in Tsedale and Angie's research is how dominant white culture in American society operates to normalize the white experience, frequently excluding all other racial groups. As illustrated in sociologist Wendy Leo Moore's work, in order for students and faculty of color to be successful in white spaces, they are often required to put their own experiences aside to "fit in" to the existing culture.

Tsedale has been questioned in her work as to whether she should center the experiences of Black women in her research without including the voices of white women. Here, white liberal faculty worked - knowingly or not - to shift the intellectual discourse back to their white voices, making them seem superior. Thankfully, Tsedale had a champion who stood up in that moment so that she would not have to legitimize Black women's voices - including her own - through the lens of a white female narrative.

In Tsedale's research, individuals in organizations who publicly align themselves with those who are vocal on issues pertaining to race and racism tend to be marginalized. Taking a stand on strong issues of racial justice and equity, calling out racist practices, or identifying ways that the institution participates in maintaining the status quo is frowned upon. Therefore, individuals who engage in this "political" work in institutions find themselves in difficult positions. This often equates to being "too Black" in white institutional spaces. Raising issues about racialized aggressions large or small and aligning oneself publicly with individuals who share in this mindset, is viewed as problematic and can lead to being penalized in the future.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Given all of this context, we return to the question we started with: Is it possible to have the kinds of constructive conversations that will lead to real change? Can the silencing of people of color be shifted? What will happen after this sudden scramble of predominantly white institutions writing statements on racial justice? Are they trying to performatively jump into the excitement of the movement?

We believe the most important thing organizations can do is outline clear, actionable steps to create change, not only at the administrative and leadership levels, but also in the behavior and mindset of white colleagues. For academic departments issuing racial and social justice affirmation statements, ask yourselves honestly: Why now? How many full-time Black faculty members do you have? Do you respect your colleagues of color by taking their complaints seriously? Do you promote their work? Do you recognize the invisible labor your colleagues of color engage in, or do you pile more work onto them expecting them to be your teachers? Have your colleagues complained of mistreatment in your institutions? How do you treat people of color who are brave enough to point out your racist practices? Do you engage in racism-denial or racial ignorance and subject your colleagues to dehumanizing white fragile behaviors? For those of you in leadership positions, have colleagues of color asked you for help? How have you responded? Have you used your voice to push for needed changes when you're at the decision-making table?

We hope that by sharing our stories, more of our colleagues in academia and beyond will be inspired to speak out - even when the crowds have gone home and if that support comes at a personal cost to you. There needs to be accountability. Progressive white people, we see you. Do you see us?
A note on style: In her academic work, Angie Beeman prefers to put the word "white" in quotation marks when referring to race to reflect the scholarly position that it does not represent a biological reality, but a harmful identity created over time to divide people.

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Academia Isn't a Safe Haven for Conversations About Race and Racism

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We are having hard conversations about racial justice in corporate America and academia right now. Will they yield anything? The research and personal stories of these authors - both scholars of color - along with experiences of many others don't offer much cause for optimism. Why?

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As a Black woman who is the chair of a university science department, people have questioned my right to exist at every stage.

Namandjé Bumpus

Namandjé Bumpus is director of the Department of Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.

Why did we let you in, then?" That was what a white colleague in a scientific society asked me when I declined to lead a new diversity initiative. I am the first Black woman to chair a department at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and the only one currently leading a department of pharmacology at any US medical school. All through my career, from grade school onwards, teachers, colleagues and leaders have challenged my place in science. When my appointment as chair was announced, I received a racist backlash through Twitter and e-mail.

Some anti-Blackness I've faced has been indisputable. Someone wrote the 'n-word' on an announcement of a scientific award that I had received, and left it in the inbox at the door to my lab. This is just one of several notes with a racial slur that I've received during my years in science.

White colleagues - initially flabbergasted at hearing about a racist incident I've faced - often follow up with denial and a desire to look outwards, but not inwards. Some have tried to explain the racism by making it my fault and insisting that I "must have done something" to bring it on. Others have reached out to tell me that what happened "actually wasn't that bad" or "we have all put it behind us". The 'we' is not meant to include me, yet insinuates that if I am to be a member of the community, I must move on at the same pace. People who knew about that note asserted only months later that they had never seen racism in academia. These are all acts of erasure of Black experience.

Part of the centring of whiteness in academia is that white faculty members are deemed the arbiters of the existence, validity and impact of racism: racism exists when white people say it does. As a result, racism is often disregarded and excused in academic institutions, at the expense of Black people.

I call on over-represented people in science who are expressing outrage about racism in broader society to focus the same level of energy on looking inwards, to wake up to how the culture in academic science is exclusionary. We debate the most exciting technology to bring to our departments to accelerate discovery; we should apply the same spirit to examining the culture of the department and improving how people are treated, because that, too, accelerates discovery. Leaders and faculty members must approach creating an anti-racist culture with the same vigour we apply to achieving every other dimension of scientific excellence.

Too often, the response to anti-Blackness in academia is to instruct Black students, fellows, staff and faculty members to simply 'fix' their feelings, rather than demand transformation of the institution. I have been counselled to "develop a thick skin about these incidents" and told that if I speak up, I will jeopardize my career. Every time I have received a scientific award or grant since my graduate studies, I have been told by members of faculty that my achievements are bestowed on me merely because I am Black. I promised myself a long time ago that I will always speak up in these situations, so I reply: "That implies that you cannot envision a scenario where a Black person is the strongest candidate." I want people to think about what they are actually saying.

I also want people to recognize intersectionality - the complex and cumulative effect of multiple systems of oppression acting in concert. Volunteers compiling lists of female scientists and Black and Latinx scientists asked me to be on the latter, but not the former, as if being Black and a woman were mutually exclusive. Until I questioned them, they had not realized that when they were making efforts to help female scientists, their image was of white women.

I've had supporters, too. My lab tries to understand how metabolism by gut enzymes, such as the cytochromes P450, explains variability in how well drugs work, particularly for HIV. During my graduate studies, I struggled for about six months on an experiment to measure an uncharacterized metabolite. My adviser told me: "If there is anyone who can get it to work, it is you." That meant a lot, and I did get it to work. That kind of support, which I have also received from my postdoc adviser, current dean and others, fuels me through the nonsense I regularly deal with.

Too many people resist recognizing racism because they want to say, "We are all good people." I say, being good means learning to recognize racism and exclusionary culture, and then taking action. That means seeking out those who are often overlooked or actively excluded, nominating Black scientists, including students and postdocs, for awards and prominent speaking engagements. It means inviting Black scientists to give departmental talks. It means creating institutional transition programmes to help Black postdocs and other emerging scientists from historically marginalized groups to move into well-resourced faculty positions.

It also means leading by example. We've seen people, from graduate students to the head of the US National Institutes of Health, refuse to serve on 'manels' - panels made up entirely of cisgender men. Why not also commit to speak only at scientific conferences and on panels that feature Black voices or those from other historically marginalized groups? Tangible activism, not slogans or defensiveness, is what will strengthen science now.

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Too many senior white academics still resist recognizing racism

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As a Black woman who is the chair of a university science department, people have questioned my right to exist at every stage. As a Black woman who is the chair of a university science department, people have questioned my right to exist at every stage.

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Part 02: How to have a conversation about racism

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Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease by Arleen Tuchman

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Research on the cultural history of diabetes, including how racism played a role in the erroneous blaming of certain racial and ethnic groups for the rise in cases, offers important lessons for COVID-19 and other public health challenges, said Arleen Tuchman, the Nelson O. Tyrone Jr. Professor of History at Vanderbilt University.

Tuchman is the author of a new book, Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease (Yale University Press, 2020). Her interest in exploring the history of the complex disease was partly driven by her father's own challenges of living with the disease for 28 years.

In researching professional and popular publications on diabetes that spanned more than a century, Tuchman found that the racial and ethnic groups considered most susceptible to the devastating disease changed radically over time.

"During the late 1800s, as people began living longer and more cases were diagnosed, diabetes was believed to be a white, middle-class disease," Tuchman said. "And the specific group that many believed had the most cases was the Jewish population. Some thought that diabetes revealed Jews' gluttony and neuroses. For others, diabetes was a sign of the Jews' 'highly civilized' state."

She noted that people of color and impoverished whites remained largely invisible in the literature on diabetes through the first half of the 20th century. However, by the 1950s, medical researchers with the U.S. Public Health Service reported that several Native American tribes had extremely high rates of the disease.

"Over time, diabetes lost its status as a disease of 'civilization' and slowly the perception became that it was more a disease of 'primitive' populations that were thought to be unable to adapt to a Western lifestyle," Tuchman said.

She also noted that the medical community did not make much distinction between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes until the 1970s. "They knew that it mattered whether you developed the disease when you were young, as compared to middle or old age, since the prognosis was far worse for children," Tuchman said. Nevertheless, most physicians and researchers still thought of diabetes as a single disease.

"It seems more than coincidental to me that at the time they began to associate middle-age diabetes with poverty, minority populations and unhealthy lifestyles, they split the disease into Type 1 and Type 2," she added.

In 1985, after the creation of the Office of Minority Health, diabetes was no longer a disease associated with the white middle-class community. Instead, there was increasing concern about its impact on minority groups, Tuchman said.

She hopes her research will help lead to a greater focus on public health and less reliance on acute care, which Tuchman said has not been able to respond adequately to COVID-19 and many other diseases.

"As an example, some people with diabetes cannot afford to have a podiatrist check their feet, increasing their risk for amputations," she said. "And while the technologies for managing diabetes are improving all of the time, they are often not available for those without insurance. Even the cost of insulin is too much for some patients."

Tuchman said she believes the medical community should pay more attention to socio-economic factors and racism-rather than race-in explaining health disparities.

"Having to live everyday with racism has been shown to contribute to chronic stress," she said. "And chronic stress directly affects your physiology, increasing your chance for weight gain and chronic illnesses-including diabetes."

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Vanderbilt historian explores impact of racism, classism on understanding diabetes

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Research on the cultural history of diabetes, including how racism played a role in the erroneous blaming of certain racial and ethnic groups for the rise in cases, offers important lessons for COVID-19 and other public health challenges, said Arleen Tuchman, the Nelson O. Tyrone Jr. Professor of History at Vanderbilt University.

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AAMC Framework for Addressing and Eliminating Racism in Academic Medicine & Beyond

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The ongoing pandemics - both COVID-19 and racism - have laid bare the dehumanizing and damaging effects of structural racism throughout our country.

Regrettably, we see these effects in academic medicine as well. As we wrote in our June 1, 2020, statement, all academic medicine leaders - including the AAMC - must step up and transform rhetoric into action.

We as individuals, as an association, as part of the academic medicine community, and as members of society need to do our own work, individually and collectively, to create a shared vision of the AAMC and academic medicine institutions as diverse, equitable, inclusive, and anti-racist organizations. We acknowledge this work can and will be difficult for even the most skilled, experienced, and well-intentioned. This framework will serve as a strategic imperative; guide our own internal efforts at the AAMC; and help amplify, support, and accelerate the efforts of our member institutions to catalyze change in academic medicine. The shared vision should emanate from our own thinking at the AAMC and from lessons learned from our members and affinity groups, the communities of which we are a part, and the communities we serve. Through our efforts, we can address and work toward eliminating racism not only within academic medicine but also in our communities and the nation.

The sense of urgency called out in our June 1, 2020, statement has ignited discussions among our staff, leaders of our member institutions, and our constituents, and it has led us to identify four sets of concrete actions to pursue as the AAMC.

1. Our own work

This calls for self-reflection and taking the initiative to educate ourselves. Each of us as individuals must work to understand systemic racism - if we don't already - and recognize its subtle manifestations in the workplace and beyond, reflect on our own racial biases and stereotypes, and examine our comfort in conversing about race and racism. The AAMC is committed to identifying, developing, and making accessible resources for staff and others to consider. As members of an organization working to become anti-racist, diverse, equitable, and inclusive, AAMC staff will be expected to be open-minded; continue the practice of respectful conversations, both formal and informal, no matter how uncomfortable; and create the necessary space where everyone can feel safe to be authentic and open to each other's identities and perspectives.

2. Our work as the AAMC

We believe the AAMC must become an anti-racist, diverse, equitable, and inclusive organization and lead and serve our member institutions in doing the same. Our vision, mission, and values will keep us focused as we work on the following highest-priority actions:

Hire a consultant to help guide our anti-racism efforts over the next three years.

Establish diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) advisors for each cluster who will serve as cluster representatives and liaisons for all matters related to DEI and our anti-racism work. Each DEI advisor will serve on the DEI Council.

Establish a DEI Council within the AAMC composed of DEI advisors from each cluster. This advisory body will advocate for, guide, and promote DEI initiatives and strategies at the AAMC. The council will report jointly to the chief human resources officer and the CEO to give voice to the direction and priorities of the DEI initiatives and ensure accountability.

Review and use the rich data, both quantitative and qualitative, on the state of DEI within the AAMC and pursue needed actions as part of our goals for fiscal year 2021 and beyond pertaining to recruitment; hiring; retention; professional and career development; staff advancement; and achieving a safe, inclusive, and anti-racist environment.

Regularly seek input from staff through intergroup dialogues, open discussion, listening sessions, and briefings about our plans and progress. The AAMC will invest in training staff interested in becoming certified trained facilitators in sustained dialogues.

Hold everyone at the AAMC responsible and accountable for continuous equity improvement through their DEI efforts, which include everyone's effort to address and eliminate racial inequities in our workplace. The AAMC will commit to re-envisioning a reporting system that is safe, accessible, and confidential so that we can address incidents of racial bias, prejudice, and discrimination in the most effective and efficient ways.

3. Our work as part of the academic medicine community

Based on our new strategic recognition that community collaborations are on par with research, education, and patient care, we will work with our councils and affinity groups to make needed change. Working with partners, we will expand our activities aimed at improving the aspects of the environment in the local Washington, D.C., community that we have the expertise and means to help change. These expansions could include collaborating with other local organizations and agencies on their anti-racism efforts and advocating for change around health inequities affecting local vulnerable communities. Importantly, we will commit to working with and learning from our member institutions to recognize and disrupt systemic and structural racism within academic medicine. For example, we will:

Explore, identify, collect, and make available effective hiring, promotion, and salary policies and practices at our member institutions.

Help identify the subtle manifestations of structural racism that lead to exclusionary admissions processes in medical schools and residency programs.

Identify promising systems-based solutions that achieve equitable enrollment and support for learners to thrive.

Identify effective approaches for achieving safe, inclusive environments and safe reporting systems.

Identify effective culture and climate assessments of institutional environments.

Conduct research on the effectiveness of anti-racism interventions.

Identify innovative and promising pedagogies that educate medical students, residents, and other clinical and research trainees effectively about racism to ensure they have the training to treat all patients and co-workers equitably and with cultural sensitivity.

Explore and identify examples of staff professional development, faculty development, and leadership development about racism, its manifestations in the workplace and learning environments, and the best approaches to addressing them, including attending to equity in appointments, salary, advancement, and leadership development.

4. Our work as part of the broader community

We will continue to speak out about the need for meaningful progress toward eliminating racism to keep it a top priority for the AAMC as an association, the community of academic medicine, the local Washington, D.C., community, and the nation. This includes speaking out about issues affected by systemic racism, from local health equity to police and public safety protocols and beyond. As an association whose mission is "to improve the health of people everywhere," we have a social contract and obligation - both locally and nationally - to hold ourselves accountable for societal health and public health needs. We will seriously consider forming a local community advisory board in the district and a national advisory board to advise us on the priority order of issues. We also encourage our member institutions to learn from their community collaborations and foster more effective efforts in every community, and we will support them in those efforts.

The need for action is urgent. We know that we must plan this difficult work carefully and well and that it will take dedication, a sustained commitment, and investment for years. We are committed to continuing the many DEI initiatives we have already started, and we strongly believe we have the collective drive, expertise, and commitment to do this work and succeed.

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Addressing and Eliminating Racism at the AAMC and Beyond

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The ongoing pandemics - both COVID-19 and racism - have laid bare the dehumanizing and damaging effects of structural racism throughout our country. Regrettably, we see these effects in academic medicine as well. As we wrote in our June 1, 2020, statement, all academic medicine leaders - including the AAMC - must step up and transform rhetoric into action.