[We are leading Nature on a journey to help decolonize research
and forge a path towards restorative justice and reconciliation.]
[[link removed]]

SCIENCE MUST OVERCOME ITS RACIST LEGACY: NATURE’S GUEST EDITORS
SPEAK  
[[link removed]]


 

Melissa Nobles , Chad Womack , Ambroise Wonkam & Elizabeth Wathuti
June 8, 2022
Nature [[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ We are leading Nature on a journey to help decolonize research and
forge a path towards restorative justice and reconciliation. _

Clockwise from top left: Chad Womack, Elizabeth Wathuti, Ambroise
Wonkam and Melissa Nobles., Credit: Bottom left: Gretchen Ertl; bottom
right: University of Cape Town

 

Science is a human endeavour that is fuelled by curiosity and a drive
to better understand and shape our natural and material world. Science
is also a shared experience, subject both to the best of what
creativity and imagination have to offer and to humankind’s worst
excesses. For centuries, European governments supported the
enslavement of African populations and the subjugation of Indigenous
people around the world. During that period, a scientific enterprise
emerged that reinforced racist beliefs and cultures. Apartheid,
colonization, forced labour, imperialism and slavery have left an
indelible mark on science.

Although valiant and painful freedom struggles eventually led to
decolonization, the impacts of those original racist beliefs continue
to reverberate and have been reified in the institutional policies and
attitudes that govern the ‘who’ and ‘how’ of individuals’
participation in the modern, global scientific enterprise. In our
opinion, racist beliefs have contributed to a lack of diversity,
equity and inclusion, and the marginalization of Indigenous and
African diasporic communities in science on a national and global
scale.

Science and racism share a history because scientists, science’s
institutions and influential supporters of science either directly or
indirectly supported core racist beliefs: the idea that race is a
determinant of human traits and capacities (such as the ability to
build civilizations); and the idea that racial differences make white
people superior. Although the most egregious forms of racism are
unlawful, racism persists in science and affects diverse communities
worldwide. Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the
expansion of the Black Lives Matter movement into
science, _Nature_ was among those institutions that pledged to
listen, learn and change. In an Editorial1
[[link removed]], it said,
“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.”

_RELATED_

Systemic racism: science must listen, learn and change
[[link removed]]

_Nature_ invited us to serve as guest editors — notably, to advise
on the production of a series of special issues on racism in science,
the first of which is due to be published later this year. We accepted
the invitation, although recognized the enormity of the challenge. How
to define terms such as race, racism and scientific culture? How to
construct a coherent framework of analysis: one that enables us to
examine how racist beliefs in European colonial and post-colonial
societies affect today’s scientists in countries that were once
colonized; and how racism affects scientists of African, Asian,
Central and South American and Indigenous heritage who are citizens
and residents of former colonial powers?

We are committed to pursuing honest dialogue and giving a voice to
those most affected by racism in science. But we also seek to provide
readers with hope and optimism. Accordingly, our aim is to showcase
some of the many examples of successful scientists who are Black,
Indigenous and People of Colour, to highlight best practices and
‘lift-up’ programmes, and to feature initiatives that empower full
participation and scientific leadership of African, Indigenous and
diasporic communities around the world.

Articles will explore some key events and discoveries, drawn from both
the scholarly literature and from lived experiences. Content will seek
to understand the systemic nature of racism in science — including
the institutions of academia, government, the private sector and the
culture of science — that can lead either to an illusion of colour
blindness (beneath which unconscious bias occurs) or to deliberate
practices that are defiantly in opposition to inclusion. The articles
will use the tools of journalism in all relevant media formats, as
well as expert comment and analysis, primary research publishing and
engagement, and will have a strong visual component.

Protestors attend a march for Black Lives Matter in Austin, Texas, in
June 2020.Credit: Mario Cantu/CSM/Sipa US/Alamy

This opening Editorial — the first _Nature_ has published signed
by external authors — is a contribution to what will be a long,
sometimes difficult, but essential and ultimately rewarding process
for the journal and its readers, and, we hope, for its publisher, too.
The journey to recognizing and removing racism will take time, because
meaningful change does not happen quickly. It will be difficult,
because it will require powerful institutions to accept that they need
to be accountable to those with less power. It will be rewarding
because it will enrich science. It is essential because it is about
truth, justice and reconciliation — tenets on which all societies
must be founded. As scientists, we know that where there are problems
in the historical record, scientific rigour and scientific integrity
demand that they be acknowledged, and, if necessary, corrected.

LOOK AT THE RECORD

So how do we know that science has advanced racist ideas? We know
because it is detailed in the published scholarly record. Some 350
years ago, François Bernier, a French physician employed in the court
of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, attempted to create a hierarchy of
people by their skin colour, religion and geography2
[[link removed]].

Such ideas came into their own when colonization was at its peak in
the 1800s and early 1900s. In 1883, Francis Galton, an English
statistician, coined the term eugenics for the study of human
improvement through genetics and selective breeding. Galton also
constructed a racial hierarchy, in which white people were considered
superior. He wrote that “the average intellectual standard of the
negro race is some two grades below our own (the Anglo Saxon)”3
[[link removed]].

Although Charles Darwin opposed slavery and proposed that humans have
a common ancestor, he also advocated a hierarchy of races, with white
people higher than others. In _The Descent of Man_, Darwin describes
what he calls the gradations between “the highest men of the highest
races and the lowest savages”4
[[link removed]]. He uses
the word ‘savages’ to describe Black and Indigenous people.

In our own times, James Watson, a Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of
the DNA double helix, voiced the opinion that Black people are less
intelligent than white people. In 1994, the psychologist Richard
Herrnstein and the political scientist Charles Murray claimed that
genetics was the main determinant of intelligence and social mobility
in American society, and that those genetics caused African Americans
and European Americans to have different IQ scores5
[[link removed]].

Cover of an essay by the nineteenth-century French diplomat and social
theorist Arthur de Gobineau justifying white supremacy (left).
Scientists publish a statement through the UN affirming that race is a
social construct and not a biological phenomenon (right).Credit: Left,
Daehan (CC BY-SA 4.0); right, UNESCO Courier 1950

By 1950, the consensus among scientific leaders was that race is a
social construct and not a biological phenomenon. Scientists affirmed
this in a statement published that year by the United Nations science
and education agency UNESCO (see go.nature.com/3mqrfcy
[[link removed]]). This has since been reaffirmed by
subsequent findings showing there is no genetic basis for race,
because humans share 99.9% similarity and have a single origin, in
Africa6 [[link removed]],7
[[link removed]]. There is
more genetic variation within ‘races’ than between them.

_RELATED_

Caltech confronted its racist past. Here’s what happened
[[link removed]]

Researching race and science matters, not only because these ideas
influenced science, but because they became attractive to
decision-makers, with horrific effects. People in power who advocated
or participated in colonization and/or slavery used science,
scientists and scientific institutions to rationalize and justify
these practices.

Take Thomas Jefferson, the third US president, who drafted the
Declaration of Independence of 1776. Jefferson is widely considered to
be among the founders of liberalism and the idea of meritocracy. The
declaration includes some of the most well-rehearsed words in the
English language: that “all men are created equal”. And yet
Jefferson, who was both a scientist and a slave owner, also thought
that people of African descent were inferior to white people.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the French diplomat and social theorist
Arthur de Gobineau wrote an essay justifying white supremacy8
[[link removed]]. De
Gobineau thought that “all civilizations derive from the white race
[and] none can exist without its help”. He argued that civilizations
eventually collapse when different peoples mix. To advance his theory,
he classified people according to their skin colour and social
backgrounds. White aristocrats were given the highest category, Black
people the lowest. De Gobineau’s ideas subsequently influenced the
development of Nazi ideology, as did Galton’s — eugenics gained
support among many world leaders, and contributed to slavery,
apartheid and colonization, and the related genocide.

Addie Lee Anderson was involuntarily sterilized in 1950 by the
Eugenics Board of North Carolina. She is pictured here in 2006 at the
age of 87.Credit: Sara D. Davis/TNS/ZUMA Press

In the early decades of the twentieth century, many US states passed
eugenic sterilization laws. For example, North Carolina enacted such a
law in 1929; by 1973, approximately 7,600 individuals had undergone
involuntary sterilization in the state. The laws initially targeted
white men who had been incarcerated for mental-health disorders,
mental disabilities or crimes, but were later used to target Black
women who received welfare benefits. It is estimated that between 1950
and 1966, Black women in North Carolina were sterilized at 3 times the
rate of white women, and at 12 times the rate of white men9
[[link removed]].

DECONSTRUCT, DEBATE AND DECOLONIZE

Even today, colonization is sometimes defended on the grounds that it
brought science to once-colonized countries. Such arguments have two
highly problematic foundations: that Europe’s knowledge was (or is)
superior to that of all others, and that non-European cultures
contributed little or nothing to the scientific and scholarly record.

These views are evident in the case of Thomas Babington Macaulay, a
historian and colonial administrator in India during the British
Empire, who famously wrote in 1835 that “a single shelf of a good
European library was worth the whole native literature of India and
Arabia”10
[[link removed]]. These
were not idle words. Macaulay used these and similar arguments to
justify stopping funding for teaching India’s national languages,
such as Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian — which, he said, taught
“false history”, “false astronomy” and “false medicine”
— in favour of teaching English language and science. Some might
question what is wrong with more English and science teaching, but the
context matters. Macaulay’s intention (in his own words) was not so
much to advance scholarship, but to educate a class of person who
would help Britain to continue its Imperial rule.

Thomas Babington Macaulay, an influential British politician in
colonial times, thought that to teach in Arabic and Sanscrit would be
to teach “false history”, “false astronomy” and “false
medicine”.Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty

The erasure of Indigenous scholarship in this way has had incalculably
damaging effects on formerly colonized countries. It has meant that
future generations in Africa, Asia and the Americas would be
unfamiliar with an unbroken history of their nations’ contributions
to knowledge, even after decolonization. At present, much of the work
to uncover non-Western scholarship is taking place in the universities
and research centres of high-income countries. That is far from
satisfactory, because it exacerbates the power imbalance in research,
particularly in collaborative research projects between high-income
and low- and middle-income countries. Although there is much talk of
‘local ownership’, the reality is that researchers in high-income
countries hold much more sway in setting and implementing research
agendas, leading to documented cases of abuses of power.

The effects of historical racism and power imbalances have also found
their way into the research funding and publishing systems of
high-income countries11
[[link removed]]. The
National Institutes of Health, the United States’ main funder of
biomedical science, recognizes that there is structural racism in
biomedical research. The funder is implementing solutions that are
starting to narrow gaps. But not all funding institutions in
high-income countries are studying or acknowledging structural or
systemic racism in their funding systems or scholarly communities.

RESTORE, REBUILD AND RECONCILE

A wave of anti-racism statements followed Floyd’s murder in 2020.
Research funders and universities, publishers and individual journals
such as _Nature_ all published statements in support of eliminating
racism from science. Two years on, the journey from words to action
has been slow and, in some respects, barely measurable.

_Nature_’s upcoming special issues, its invitation to work with us
as guest editors and its ongoing coverage of racism in science are
necessary steps to inform, encourage debate and, ultimately, seek
solutions-based approaches that propose ways to restore truth, repair
trust and seek justice.

We must have hope that the future will be better than the past,
because every alternative is worse. But solutions must also
acknowledge the reasons why solutions are necessary. Racism has led to
injustices against millions of people, through slavery and
colonization, through apartheid and through continuing prejudice
today. The point of learning about and analysing racism in science
must be to ensure that it is never repeated.

_Nature_ 606, 225-227 (2022)

_doi: [link removed]

Editor’s note: Melissa Nobles, Chad Womack, Ambroise Wonkam and
Elizabeth Wathuti are currently working with _Nature_ as guest
editors to guide the creation of several special issues of the journal
dedicated to racism in science. To the best of our knowledge, this
Editorial is the first in _Nature_ to be signed by guest editors. We
are proud of this, and look forward to working with them on these
special issues and beyond.

Disclaimer: The opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect
the views or policies of the authors’ organizations or their
governing bodies.

References

*
_Nature_ 582, 147 (2020).

PubMed
[[link removed]] Article
[[link removed]] Google Scholar
[[link removed]] 

*
_Journal des Sçavans_ 12, 148–155 (1684).

Google Scholar
[[link removed]] 

*
Galton, F. _Hereditary Genius_ (Macmillan, 1869).

Google Scholar
[[link removed].] 

*
Darwin, C. R. _The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to
Sex_ (John Murray, 1871).

Google Scholar
[[link removed].] 

*
Herrnstein, R. J. & Murray, C. _The Bell Curve_ (Free Press, 1994).

Google Scholar
[[link removed].] 

*
Collins, F. S., Morgan, M. & Patrinos, A. _Science_ 300, 286–290
(2003).

PubMed
[[link removed]] Article
[[link removed]] Google Scholar
[[link removed].] 

*
Chan, E. K. F. _et al._ _Nature_ 575, 185–189 (2019).

PubMed
[[link removed]] Article
[[link removed]] Google Scholar
[[link removed].] 

*
De Gobineau, A. _Essai sur l’Inégalité des Races
Humaines_ (Firmin Didot, 1853–55).

Google Scholar
[[link removed]] 

*
Stern, A. M. _The Conversation_ (26 August 2020).

*
Macaulay, T. B. in _Selections from Educational Records, Part I
(1781–1839)_ Sharp, H. (ed.) 109 (Government of India, 1920).

Google Scholar
[[link removed]] 

*
Ginther, D. K. _Science_ 333, 1015–1019 (2011).

PubMed
[[link removed]] Article
[[link removed]] Google Scholar
[[link removed].] 

* Science
[[link removed]]
* Racism
[[link removed]]
* scientific integrity
[[link removed]]
* social justice
[[link removed]]
* diversity
[[link removed]]
* Equity
[[link removed]]
* inclusion
[[link removed]]
* slavery
[[link removed]]
* apartheid
[[link removed]]
* imperialism
[[link removed]]
* restorative justice
[[link removed]]
* reconciliation
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]