UNITED STATES
Swimming in the shoals of academic racism in US STEM
The numbers are stunning. Eighty-eight percent of United States science and engineering professionals are white or Asian.Thirty-seven percent of American colleges and universities have no black faculty in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) programmes, while 28% have one black faculty in these programmes.
In 2014, 53% of the full-time STEM professors in the historically black colleges and universities (HBCU), such as Howard University in Washington, DC, were white men.
Of the nation’s 203 engineering faculties, half reported having not a single black student.
By refusing to match federal funds, between 2000 and 2016, one state, Tennessee, shorted the state’s two HBCUs of US$37 million; predictably, students in these universities’ STEM programmes graduate with greater debt.
After graduation, black STEM workers earn 19% less than whites with the same qualifications.
But Ebony O McGee’s Black, Brown, Bruised: How racialized STEM education stifles innovation* is much more than a catalogue of the failures of American universities to educate under-represented, racially minoritised (URM) students – which include Black, Latinx and Indigenous students.
Rather, it is a searing analysis of the failure of what is often touted by liberals as the gold standard of interacting with URM students, the claim to being ‘colour blind’, and, even more importantly (and emotionally affecting), the psychological cost that successful URM students pay as they struggle to navigate their way through the shoals of academic racism.
McGee uses a phenomenological approach: her arguments pivot (better, come alive) by focusing on individuals’ lived experiences. Among these are racial microaggressions, for example, “looks of disbelief when URM students walk into an advanced math class” or having their comments ignored in group work.
Sadly, reading that Maya, who earned her doctorate at a white university in the American South had to put up with being called a “monkey” did not surprise. Nor did reading that her “caring white advisor” told her: “Just be the person you need to be and don’t worry about the colour of your skin and your sex. Just worry about engineering.”
The problem, McGee notes, is that this “colour-blind ideology presents an unrealistic demand to pretend that racism does not exist or is not important”. In other words, it asks Maya to ignore her lived experience and allows racism confronting her to go unchallenged.
Further, the advice to ignore her skin colour – and all that it entails in the racist history of the United States – has the unintended consequence of underscoring the widely held view in America that her skin colour (and gender) are problematic.
It’s hard not to wince when McGee characterises the situation: “If she could only pretend she was no different from the other people in the dominant white group, Maya could blend into the department and all would be well.”
Except, the strategy doesn’t work, as the Latinx José, a second-year physics major, learned at the chemistry lab he was doing research at. When it was his turn to choose the lab’s background music, he played a salsa CD. For half a minute the lab was quiet, then everyone burst out laughing and began imitating salsa dancing.
Worse, no doubt borrowing from music videos, his (all) white and Asian lab mates “called each other ‘ese’ (Spanish shorthand for ‘Hey bro’) [and a term used by members of some gangs to self-identify] and acted out a gang gun battle.”
Humiliated, José took the CD and ran from the lab. After three weeks of teasing, he left that lab despite liking the research he was doing there. José’s curriculum vitae opened the door to another lab, where the principal investigator made him feel welcome, but also told him not to be “too sensitive about jokes and good-natured fun”.
The experience at the first lab resulted in him avoiding discussing his Latinx heritage and hiding his girlfriend’s pregnancy for fear of what others would say.
The stereotype that blacks are not good at STEM results, McGee’s research shows, in a number of psychologically deleterious effects. One is the “imposter syndrome”, the feeling that you are not in the programme on your own merits, that you are, as a fellow engineering professor told McGee about the black students in his school: “Honestly, we just call them quota kids, anyway.”
To prove they belong – and remember, these students have the grades and degrees to be in their programmes – 81% of 48 URM students in a recent study said they worked twice as hard as the other students, giving up weekends and holidays, in the vain hope that this extra lab time would be seen as demonstrating the work ethic that eugenics-inspired racial thinking denies URM students can have.
This constant pressure can lead to “racial battle fatigue” and stress-related diseases such as high blood pressure.
More than once, I found myself thinking that beyond the obvious racism of certain comments, they were, quite simply, rude. One was uttered by the student who said to a URM classmate, who came to school in a new red and blue Nike jumpsuit: “You are confusing me. Are you Bloods or Crips?”, referring to the names of street gangs.
While their white and Asian classmates can focus on the tasks at hand, to get by in these toxic environments, URM students engage in the practice of “frontin’”, the performance of an act that the white audience can accept.
An example is a student who described himself as a large black male who can “intimidate most whites”. To keep from attracting unwanted attention, “my mom told me,” the student told McGee, “that I would have to walk through life with a big goofy grin on my face or the world would be scared of me.”
Another student’s frontin’ took the place of asking for clarification in a maths class. “It’s like they are waiting for me to shut the f–k up. So I just nod no matter what… then at an inconspicuous hour I go find the teaching assistant.”
Both Rob and Tinesha used humour to parry racist questions and return to their work. Tinesha, who already held a masters degree in bioengineering, knew that the student who asked her, “What is it like to be black?” and “How did it feel to live around gangbangers [criminal gang members]?”, was not seeking information.
Rather, he was using the interrogative form to mark the line that at some level he believed she had breached. Her response, “Well, how did it feel to be privileged and not really struggle for anything?”, shut him down and showed what she had learned in the African studies courses she had recently taken. Yet, it was still up to her, she told McGee, to smooth the ruffled feathers “so that work could proceed”.
Rob broadcast his sense of humour and hard-won self-confidence by wearing a T-shirt saying “Danger: Educated Black Man.” Still, neither it nor the fact he had earned three masters degrees and was working on his PhD stopped his applied math professor from asking if he knew any “good cleaning ladies” or if someone in his family “might be in need of a job”.
Through the pain of hearing his female relatives reduced to stereotypes, he answered that all of his family members held masters degrees.
What, then, is to be done?
While McGee calls for a root and branch deconstruction and rebuilding of STEM education – and, by extension, a re-orientation of how science and technology function in society at large, most of her recommendations don’t require administrators to sign on up for the revolution.
(Early in the book she notes that while it is beyond the scope of this study, we should keep in mind that the “principles and values of the cultural founders of STEM” underlay the building of more nuclear bombs, stealing and selling personal information and “killing our Earth”.)
Whether or not McGee is right to believe that the ideology of rugged individualism that undergirds those non-URM postdoctoral scholars who said they were drawn to their fields because of the “freedom to choose their own research topics” has run its course, there is no question that the URM students she interviewed “expressed more altruistic goals” for why they were studying STEM.
Were she writing now, she might point to the fact that unlike, say, the Salk polio vaccine, named for its discoverer, Jonas Salk, the COVID-19 vaccines were developed by groups of scientists working in their own labs but – and this is crucially related to McGee’s project – sharing information across the globe.
This effort can, perhaps, be viewed as a real-time example of what the Ojibwas (indigenous people) of Ontario and the northern Midwestern United States call “gathering to learn and do mathematics together, collectively performing useful action”, an example McGee points to.
In addition to providing financial aid and scholarships to URM students, McGee calls for other changes, including curricula in which students “apply their skills to humanitarian projects”, such as designing computer code that supports projects dealing with mental health struggles of urban youth of colour.
Pointing for a moment toward the high schools that fail to support URM students interested in STEM, she suggests a curriculum that develops mathematical literacy by analysing culturally relevant issues, including rates of college graduation, homicide and incarceration among black men.
The sine qua non of future URM student success is recognising that Rob’s or Tanesha’s psychological or mathematical armour is not the norm. To assume it is, McGee notes, is to accept that individual “grit” and the ability to skew racist comments has anything to do with STEM ability.
Institutional supports
Instead, McGee sketches out a number of institutional supports designed to counter the racist structures in STEM education. These include hiring counsellors of colour who specialise in the trauma experience in STEM education and creating bridge programmes for pre-freshmen (to combat feelings of isolation).
Her most important recommendation concerns mentorships. Indeed, the book’s second paragraph explains: “Without these faculty advocates, they [URM students] face limited learning opportunities and miss out on academic programmes such as studying abroad and tuition-paid research assistant positions.”
These mentors must go beyond simply being respectful of and involving their students in their research. They have to “offer affective support … [that] acknowledge the struggle of URM groups”, which includes supporting their mentees’ “interest in racial justice issues” and helping them identify and talk about oppression.
This last point is vital because URM students need a “safe space” where they can both vent and find ways to confront the racism coursing through STEM programmes.
Rebuilding the STEM departments will produce the sort of metrics that appeal to university administrators. An editorial in the scientific journal Nature called for increased diversity in STEM. A study conducted in 2012 by the National Center for Women and Information Technology showed that mixed gender research teams filed 40% more patents than did all-male teams; a similar rate might be expected of racially mixed research teams.
McGee’s book shows that the “leaky pipeline” argument for why there are fewer URM in STEM programmes and jobs doesn’t hold water, as it were. Indeed, as Lou Matthews, Bermuda’s former director of educational standards and accountability, told her: “The pipeline argument is an insult to pipelines, which flow with much less dysfunction and less bias than this passive metaphor claims.”
Rather, the fault lies in the racist structures in American society and, especially, in the present formation of STEM programmes.
*Ebony Omotola McGee, Black, Brown, Bruised: How racialized STEM education stifles innovation, Harvard Education Press, ISBN: 978-1-68253-535-6.