Scary White Men

I have an invited guest speaker, a White male scientist, from a private company, who leads a DEI initiative designed to expose BIPOC youth to their STEM field. My student, A.L. begins her poem by vilifying the white male scientist as something to be afraid of. While conversations about STEM and inclusivity are generally centered around the advancement of BIPOC scientists themselves, one of the earliest barriers for women of color entering STEM is based in historical and generational trauma.

Putting aside the BIPOC scientist for a moment, consider the BIPOC individual: Black and Indigenous people in the United States have faced atrocities and violence at the hands of medical professionals, researchers and scientists, all in the name of scientific advancement since initial conquest. That is not to say this is a problem for the history books as this violence persists to this day. In my living grandparents’ lifetime the Dine people on the Navajo reservation were used by scientists as experimental subjects without their consent in government funded research on the effects of uranium exposure on humans. The Dine were hired to mine uranium for the Manhattan Project at a time when the government knew full well there would be horrifying health consequences (“Uranium mining and the Navajo people,” n.d.).  In my parents lifetime the reservations were exposed to mass sterilizations without consent at the hands of physicians funded by the United States government after they passed the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970 (Theobald, 2019).

Black and Latinx individuals were also targeted by this act. In my lifetime, scientists at Arizona State University used donated blood samples from the Havasupai people to perform genetic research without the tribal members’ consent. Researchers went on to publish work, using the blood samples, to propose speculations on the tribe’s relationship with alcoholism, inbreeding and to refute tribal creation stories (Sterling, 2011). These stories are just the ones published for the world to read. As we have seen with the Black Lives Matter movement and readily available recording devices: the violence is not new, we are simply being listened to for the first time.

My mother says, “You are the strongest. You are the product of the people who survived.” But that survival was guaranteed by teaching our children to navigate the world that would meet them when they left the arms of our community. That survival was guaranteed by teaching our children that White male scientist were not to be trusted. And, given just the known history, who would be so cruel to tell them otherwise. ↩

The speaker was presenting to all Green Tech Interns about internship opportunities in their STEM field. The Green Tech Internship program is meant to be an experiential learning environment and bringing in field experts to discuss their experiences or opportunities available to youth in their field is part of that. I have struggled to find individuals in STEM fields who have the flexibility and self-management privilege to volunteer their time who are also BIPOC. When a partnership is established, it would be awkward and unprofessional for me to ask about the ethnic make-up of a potential volunteer base, especially since that has the potential to also be offensive to those interested in volunteering. As a non-profit, we rely heavily on volunteers and do not want to “bite-the-hand-that-feeds,” but a lack of diversity in STEM fields has resulted in a lack of diversity in the pool of individuals willing and able to reach back to community and youth in these types of platforms. So as an educator trying to equalize representation in my own programming, I am stuck in this space where I have to decide whether to disallow this aspect of programming for fear of lack of racial or gender representation or allow those who, putting it heavily, sometimes represent oppressive histories to have access to the youth that I serve.

It is important to note that many youth enjoyed the presentation and felt they gained something positive from the interaction, most of them male-identifying. But for A.L. and a handful of others, this was not the case. So, was it worth it? In order to engage some, am I actively pushing others from pursuing a career in STEM? ↩