Diversity, equity, and inclusion. DEI. That phrase the scientific community uses to show they are making such a valiant effort to ensure a welcoming work environment for everyone. Ugh. The very thought fills me with dread, a horrible gnawing pain in my stomach, as if overloaded on sour gummy worms and diet cherry coke—only now combined with a side of racism.
If this treatise were written for whiter members of the scientific community, the DEI section would be closer to the top, and it would probably be a lot longer. It would talk about the history of the American URM (UnderRepresented Minority), the depressing numbers presented on slides year after year after year, and how we can’t retain people of color if we do recruit them. It would talk about the “meritocracy myth” and how this myth operates in science. It also might touch on “why we can’t find URMs,” or deliberately answer that lingering question, “Do we take the URM, even if a white candidate is more talented?” It might make ample fun of the attitude treating URMs, and especially “talented” URMs, as if they are mythical creatures. That’s right, my friends of color: we are all unicorns.
But this document is written mostly for women of color: well aware that we exist, well aware that we are just as talented or more so than everyone else, who feel the full grit of being in plain sight of the very same people going, “Oh, how ever will we find the legendary URMs?” You can find info on all that diversity shit in other places, as many, many others have written about the subject with more eloquence than I personally want to give it. I recommend people start with DiAngelo’s White Fragility, and move on from there.
For my women of color scientific colleagues, I put the section on doing DEI work where I think it belongs—near the bottom. You might be thinking: “What the hell? Does Andrea just not care?”
Of course I care. Probably a lot more than most. But as with all race-related things, nothing is as it seems. Let’s take down the smoke and mirrors for a minute, and have an honest look at this system.
In my graduate school days, well-versed in the “underrepresentation problem,” I devoted huge amounts of time to DEI. I volunteered in low-income classrooms to teach about the brain. I spoke and performed demonstrations at science fairs for kids of all backgrounds, all across Washington state. I also served as a primary recruiter for my graduate program. I attended conferences nationwide to talk to prospective graduate students. My favorite conference was SACNAS, because it had played a pivotal role in my early scientific career, and it was nice to feel I was returning the favor.
I loved all of this work. I loved seeing little kids universally geeking out over the MindFlex Duel game, where you can move objects with the “power of your mind—” oh man, and their eyes light up like fireworks when you explain that this energy is produced by the brain’s neurons, and that the brain can serve as a battery—whhhattt? It was nice to hear from the occasional student in the incoming graduate cohort, “I’m here in this program because of Andrea McQuate. She recruited me at SACNAS.” It was nice to think of myself as the one sent out to fetch fresh blood—even when I was deep into the graduate school torture machine, and I probably shouldn’t have been sent anywhere near prospective students. But note that I took no time off from science to do all of this work. I was working full days, and reading papers through every conference, and there was never any “break.” There was never any extra pay either, like I should even entertain that dream.
During graduate school, I hated the way most talked about DEI. I hated that people were telling me that my skin color was an advantage. I wanted my melanin content and my scientific work to be separate. One was under my control, the other wasn’t. Why did everyone insist on putting these things in the same sentence? Couldn’t I just be a scientist, and not a Black scientist? Fuck that. So I really refused to talk about DEI in this light. I took sharing the scientific passion with the upcoming generation of scientists of color as my way of promoting diversity, leaving affirmative action conversations to others.
After graduate school, I volunteered to be the post doc representative on our departmental diversity committee. By this time, I was beginning to feel like more conversation about the topic was necessary, and if I didn’t like the way people talked about it, then it was my responsibility (seriously, responsibility, I called it) to attempt make changes. Affirmative action was good, but you have to talk about it correctly, not just tell people they’re “Lucky to be Black.” So I was here to help people talk about it correctly. On this committee were five other white faculty… and me. I very quickly found myself doing most of the hard work. One member would make an email list. One member would take notes during the meeting. Perhaps another would email other faculty in departments to see if anyone else was interested in sharing materials.
I would end up, for example, interviewing other departments about how they implemented a climate survey, taking notes, getting the climate survey implemented in our own department, and once it was complete, analyzing all the data. Again, no break from science to do this. An idea that routinely came up was organizing workshops to discuss DEI issues with departmental members. Although everyone said this was a good idea, they seemed terrified of it. I was honestly terrified too, because I’d never done something like that before, and I’d spent graduate school running away from affirmative action conversations, but hey, progress doesn’t happen until someone at least tries something. So I said I’d give it a go. I worked with another faculty member on getting the workshop running, which was nice—and I was proud of what we came up with and ultimately implemented.
A third faculty member volunteered to make promotional fliers. This was super kind, because I really have no graphic design skills, and I didn’t have the time. He asked for a contact to be put on the flier. I said the contact should be the chair of the committee. The committee chair balked, as if this were some horrible thought. I ended up being the contact. Okay, whatever, moving on.
Except, there was a typo on that flyer. Instead of appropriately saying “Wednesday,” the flyer read “Thursday.” Once the flyers were pinned all around the department, multiple emails suddenly popped up in my inbox asking what was the correct date. I had to respond to all these inquisitions to assure them they had the date right, despite the wrong weekday printed. Then I had to correct the flyer, get it re-approved for posting, print them out again, and then walk up and down the departmental halls, replacing all the erroneous flyers. Never mind, that I had an experiment running and I really didn’t have time to be pacing hallways, putting up flyers. I had a couple people to help, but the time I spent doing this felt strangely used for someone else’s agenda, and wasted in the context of my own life.
Oh, on that chilly, mid-January afternoon, scouring hallways to replace typo-laden flyers, the DNA of some mini prep left abandoned on my lab bench, it really hit me: “This. Is. Not. My. Job.”
Your job is to do science at the highest level, and as we said earlier, to expand the boundaries of human knowledge. DEI work is not your job. The “DEI problem” was not created by people of color. It was created by whiteness, that is only comfortable around a culture of whiteness, and continues to promote a culture of whiteness, as they continue to say they want an environment that is 100% equitable and inclusive. Ha! Fixing this is the furthest thing from your responsibility possible. Thus: you should feel perfectly justified in saying “no” to requests to join a DEI committee. If you ask me, I’ll tell you to say no unless you’re itching to be on it. If you’re not itching for this, stay the hell away from it. It can do more damage to your career than good for anyone else’s.
Here is the truth of what can happen if it becomes your job:
Yes, I really enjoyed being a recruiter for the UW graduate program in neuroscience. But during those times where I was across the country recruiting, other graduate students were in the lab, doing experiments and collecting data. It was time I would never get back. Yes, it is nice to be known as that person who can bring in fresh blood. But that is also how people will think of you—permanently. Recently, when I heard faculty describing another graduate student of color as “being so good at recruiting,” without the tiniest mention that she was actually a scientist in a microbiology program, I cringed so hard. Do you want to be known as a recruiter before you’re known as a scientist? And being of color makes that “softer, fluffier” label all the easier for the non people of color to accept. Can you see how damaging this can be for one’s career and how it can act against upward movement through the ranks? Can you just see the pigeon-holes being created, waiting for people of color trip, fall into, and get stuck? And can one see that so long as the environment hovers in toxicity, that recruiting more people of color into it is just as cruel as dooming the recruiter to a life of scientific obscurity? I have genuine fears now that my graduate program now remembers me more as “the SACNAS recruiter” than as “a kickass electrophysiologist,” which is of course what I would prefer.
In the same vein: can you see how quickly on the committee, where these faculty sat around dreaming about “where the talented URMs are,” I ended up doing a lot of heavy lifting? Can you see how much effort it takes, to juggle this on top of a scientific career, when other trainees do not have this burden? And how the mere concept of “taking a day off from science to reflect and do diversity work” is such a load of privileged bullshit you have to wonder if anyone actually thought about it before proposing it?
I have excellent time management skills, and sheer hours clocked was never the problem. It was mostly the mental toll it could take. I’m sure as faculty leave those meetings, they can blissfully waltz back into whatever they were doing before without the slightest thought. I would leave the meetings seething in rages that could last for days, severely crippling my focus and productivity. Nothing can wear out one’s self worth like (1) listening to full-scale racism kneaded with words into “good intentions.” (2) hearing people chanting, “Black Lives Matter!” promptly followed by a series of microagressions aimed at you or others (3) when you point out that fact, being deflected and turned into the perpetrator, (4) white tears and cries that “they’ve suffered so much” as they reek of privilege. I’ll tell you, after every diversity meeting, it usually took eating an entire bag of tortilla chips to calm down enough to focus again. No one wants to eat a full bag of tortilla chips. I maintain that if people of color were able to use their full brains for research without stewing over all this nonsense, science would be far better off for what we’d be able to fully bring to the table. DEI work, without any doubt, significantly retracted from what I could bring to the scientific table. With that, I finally resigned from the committee and any and all “official” diversity work.
To incoming scientists of color, I say: learn about the ways of the System. Read the books, understand the perspectives of other people of color to know that you’re not alone in this weird-ass white culture. Use the knowledge as a way of shielding yourself from the oddities. If you feel highly passionate about DEI work, by all means, participate. But if you are in science to do science, then there is no better way to increase diversity in your field than by focusing on doing what you are paid to do—which is not listening to white people whine and squirm in their discomfort.
After resigning from the committee, I developed a new mantra. Yes, being a person of color in the sciences sometimes feels like constantly swimming upstream, without any assistance from The System. My new task is “how do I swim to the top of this System, and take everyone I can along with me?” That philosophy now takes all the effort I once poured into DEI, primarily mentoring. I also do point out racism when I see it, gracefully, tactfully. With one seminar speaker, who included a racist slide in her talk (completely unintentionally!), I met with her for lunch, talked a lot about the science over that lunch, and then brought up the troublesome slide in an email. I explained the problem. She changed the slide and thanked me for the feedback, with only slight defensiveness. It worked beautifully.
Both volcanos and glaciers can metamorphose a landscape. But when volcanos make themselves heard, people flee. Glaciers will ever so slowly carve out a valley. Every year, it will nudge a few more inches—the people living around it adjust. A few more inches—the people adjust again, until over hundreds of years, the people have completely changed without even really noticing they were being pushed around. I’m not saying I want this process of equity to take hundreds of years, but sometimes, it is better to be a glacier than a volcano.
The problem with much formalized DEI work is that it only functions as the white folk want it to function, and thus, often doesn’t work at all. But to make this place truly inclusive, we in many ways need to run this glacier through this academia culture and carve it into a new shape. I want to bring my comrades of color into the sciences in a way that will so gently take the system apart, in a way that they come into a less toxic system, a more inclusive system. Quietly, inch the glacier forward, remove one stone from the dam, day by day, year by year—until one day the dam bursts over this water system, and the current is neutralized, and there is no such thing as “swimming upstream.” It’s a quiet process. There is no ego in this process. But I’m convinced the consequences of it are real.
Andrea L McQuate 