After the first physics exam I ever failed, I locked myself in my car in the North Perimeter parking lot, curled into the crease of the seat, and wondered if I had the “merit” to be a scientist.
In my mind, I had proven true the messaging about science from the right wing: People like me, brown skin and broad nasal bridge, facial features indicating a lineage south of the border, perhaps simply do not have the chops.
This is the great danger of the claim that diversity is antithetical to merit.
There’s an implication hiding in the weeds — that the most qualified candidate for the job is always a rather clean-cut white guy. If we did make it, there must be something really special about us. We must be one of the good ones.
Everyone, whether subconsciously or not, absorbs this narrative. When people of color are told that our lives and identities are inconsistent with the image of the ideal scientist, it becomes easy to accept the social rules that are being written for us.
But thank God we don’t.
Diversity brings new ideas to the table, which should excite every physicist.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, a prominent Black astrophysicist, describes diversity measures as “a way to encourage agencies to look to places you hadn’t looked before for talent that you’d been missing.”
If you’re going to be asking questions about the nature of the universe, you’re going to want as many perspectives and as much help as possible.
The national dialogue on diversity is flooded with “ifs and buts” of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Indeed, there are specific implementations masquerading as DEI that do not serve disadvantaged communities and should be appropriately reassessed. But, beneath the roaring, public disagreement on DEI, it seems many have tragically forgotten the extensive benefit that diversity itself provides to the scientific community.
Black and Brown people make good scientists.
We belong in scientific spaces not only because they enrich our lives, but because we enrich them. There’s extensive literature tying benefits of diversity to the production of knowledge.
When we widen the range of background involved in the research, we widen the scope of the questions we ask and the problems we solve. Diversity initiatives are a tool that institutions should use to enhance their programs.
UC Santa Cruz, alongside all other institutions of higher education, should do everything in its capacity to promote and protect diversity in their science programs in the face of federal attempts to devalue diversity.
Black, Hispanic, and Native American students compose roughly a third of higher education enrollment, but only 11 percent of bachelors degrees in physics.
This divide means institutions must make more efforts to increase opportunities for these groups, not less.
When we see more students from marginalized backgrounds in our science classes, it teaches all of us a different lesson. It deprograms self-doubt and charges Black and Brown students with a new, healthy optimism for our science careers. Establishing a sense of belonging is a transformative thing for a young scientist.
Thankfully, there are people of color in my lecture halls at UCSC. Thankfully, I can walk into my lab courses and be greeted with faces that look like my own and come from any number of underrepresented backgrounds. But this is a fragile, precious thing that needs to be protected and fostered.
Every science department in the United States stands at a crossroads right now.
We build upon the systems that diversify our pool of researchers, thinkers and teachers, or we let them crumble. We set up pathways for marginalized groups to participate in the sciences, or we deal with the consequences of their absence.
I have no doubt we are capable of defending the opportunities we value. We’re smart. We’re scientists.
We sure as hell have the goddamn “merit” to do so.