For a day, scientists pause science to confront racism
Galvanized by the reaction to the killing of George Floyd and continued reports that minority researchers feel marginalized and disrespected, almost 6,000 scientists and academicians committed to participating in a one-day strike Wednesday.
The event was organized by a loosely affiliated group of physicists and cosmologists operating under various hashtags, including #Strike4BlackLives, #ShutDownStem and #ShutDownAcademia.
Participants canceled classes, lectures or committee meetings; held off on reporting any breakthroughs; skipped engaging with email; and avoided reading draft articles for peer review. Instead, they committed to devoting the day to a close examination of how science does business.
“Racism in science is enmeshed with the larger scheme of white supremacy in society,” said Brian Nord, a physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois and one of the organizers of the strike, repeating a phrase he attributed to his co-organizer, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a cosmologist at the University of New Hampshire. “We need to rethink what scientific collaborations should look like. Black people need a seat at the table.”
He added, “The idea is to disrupt the system, at least for a day.” As of Wednesday morning, some 5,700 scientists had signed a pledge to strike, and registration was closed. The petition reads, in part, “We recognize that our academic institutions and research collaborations — despite big talk about diversity, equity and inclusion — have ultimately failed black people.”
Demands for justice have been met with gradualism and tokenism, the organizers said, and black students still often feel unsupported and unwelcome at predominantly white college campuses and laboratories.
Many leading scientific journals — including Science, Physical Review Letters and arXiv, an online platform where physicists post preprints — committed to being silent Wednesday.
The journal Nature, which publishes new research papers every Wednesday, held off on doing so until Thursday.
“Nature condemns police prejudice and violence, we stand against all forms of racism, and we join others around the world in saying, unequivocally, Black Lives Matter,” its statement read. “We recognize that Nature is one of the white institutions that is responsible for bias in research and scholarship. The enterprise of science has been — and remains — complicit in systemic racism, and it must strive harder to correct those injustices and amplify marginalized voices.”
The American Astronomical Association offices in College Park, Md., were closed Wednesday and issued no news releases.
Nord said the idea for the strike arose a week ago in conversations with Prescod-Weinstein. “We decided we needed to make a strike for black physicists,” Nord said.
Elsewhere, Brittany Kamai, a physicist at the University of California-Santa Cruz and the California Institute of Technology, and Jedidah Isler, an astrophysics professor at Dartmouth, were also pondering how to shut down the digital highways of science and academia.
“There is no way that ‘business as usual’ can continue while police and other agents of the state murder black people and are not held accountable,” Kamai said.