Minorities in the Sciences: Fully Welcome?

As I wrote previously, us whites (or, in my case, almost-white) have a burden of responsibility to make the world better for all races—we have to work for good, not merely not be evil.

Academia, and in particular science, prides itself for being progressive in all ways. In particular, we proclaim ourselves (I am a botany professor) to not be racist. And, compared to many other areas of society (government, business, religion) we are correct. But it is not quite so simple. Here are three examples that show that work remains to include all races in the scientific enterprise.

First example. I heard an interview on the radio. A black ornithology student (he studies birds) said that he had been confronted by white groups because he was looking in the trees with binoculars. Of course, that’s what ornithologists do. (Embarrassingly but not surprisingly, this example came from my state of Oklahoma.) Right away, you see the problem. White people seeing blacks looking through binoculars might assume they are up to some criminal activity. Do ornithologists need to carry ID cards saying that they are ornithologists, and be prepared to show those cards to whoever comes along and confronts them? Or is it that black, not white, ornithologists need to do this? See the fascinating article in Orion magazine.

Second example. A couple of decades ago, I was one of the faculty judges of student presentations at the national meeting of the Botanical Society of America. I watched several undergraduate student presentations, and kept numerical scores on each. By keeping numerical scores, the other judges and I did the best we could to avoid bias. When our judging committee met, it was clear from our scores and our overall impressions that the best paper was one that had been presented by a black female. She got the prize and we were all happy. I hope she went on to a great career. However, one prominent botanist, at a major university, was quite upset. He told the chair of our judging committee how upset he was. The chair did not tell us about it until just before the awards banquet, by which time it could not influence our decision. The racist was a prominent enough botanist that, had he known who I was and that I was still a junior professor, he might have talked trash about me and held my career back, had he chosen to.

Third example. This same prominent botanist mentioned above had a brilliant mixed-race undergraduate student who later entered the same graduate program that I was in, with the same advisor, and who went on to a distinguished career. This unnamed senior botanist told my advisor that this student was just fine, the only problem was that he was black.

Incidentally, the Botanical Society link above includes Black Botanist Week.

Racial prejudice persists against scientists of color, both from the general public and among scientists. The main difference is that us scientists (at least, botanists, about whom I know) are doing our best to solve the problem.

We Are All Minorities

On a recent NPR interview, I heard an old survivor of the 1960s civil rights struggles say that we are all minorities. Since the recent election, we have heard a lot about the reassertion of dominance by the white Christian majority. But this “majority” is actually a coalition of minorities. There are many different “white” ethnic groups. White ethnicity is a fiction created by the desire of many white minorities to band together to repress people of color.

Of course it is not just the “whites” that do this. “Africans” do this also. There is no single African race. The people of north Africa, the Bantu people of west Africa, the Mbuti of the Ituri Forest, the Ethiopians and Somalis, and the San of south Africa are all different races. You will find African-Americans from all of these different racial backgrounds. “White” racism has forced all “Africans” into a coalition.

The same is true of Native Americans. Today, all of the tribes are in the same boat and act as if they are one people. You can go to any pow-wow you like across the country—and some people apparently spend their summer vacation doing this—and it is pretty much the same. The Cherokee pow-wows of my tribe in Oklahoma look and sound almost identical to the Lakota pow-wows I attended when I lived in Minnesota. My tribe, the Cherokee tribe, used to fight against the Creeks for access to hunting grounds. But the overwhelming force of “white” genocide and land-grabbing (by Americans of English, Irish, Scottish, German, etc., descent) has forced all 500 tribes into a coalition.

But there is an insight that comes from thinking of ourselves as minorities, even those of you in the “white majority.” We are all minorities and have to work together for the survival of the world. If any of you think of the Trump victory as a victory of whites, you are contributing to a mindset that endangers the future of the world.