By Leah Crane
Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Ge
Scientists around the world are striking to raise awareness of institutional and systemic racism against Black academics. This event comes in conjunction with widespread protests against police violence after the killing of George Floyd, who died on 25 May after a Minneapolis police officer pinned him to the ground by his neck.
The strike was organised by a group of academics, many of them physicists and astronomers based in the US, and promoted on social media with the hashtags #ShutDownAcademia, #ShutDownSTEM and #Strike4BlackLives. The organisers are encouraging academics across STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields to take the day away from their normal research and instead spend it educating themselves on racial disparities in their field and taking action against racial violence and discrimination. At least 5000 academics based at universities from around the world have joined the course.
“As academics, we do not exist in a vacuum and it is important to recognise the current events: Black members of our communities are being harassed and lynched with little to no consequence, as well as being disproportionately affected by the current pandemic,” says Tien-Tien Yu, a particle physicist at the University of Oregon who has helped organise the event through the Particles for Justice group. “We need to acknowledge that this takes a toll on the well-being of Black academics and that Black Lives Matter.”
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The organisers are also hoping that this event will inspire academics to hold their institutions to a higher standard. “We hope everyone comes out of this with concrete steps they can take and ask for from their academic institutions,” says Seyda Ipek at the University of California, Irvine, another particle physicist and member of Particles for Justice. Those steps could include hiring more Black faculty members, deeply interrogating how researchers’ academic work is used in broader society and making university campuses safer and more welcoming for non-white students.
It is also an opportunity for Black researchers to take a break from their everyday work, which many are now trying to do in the midst of a global reckoning about racism.
In the interests of that, some scientific institutions have also pledged to participate by either shutting down for the day or releasing resources for people hoping to make a difference in the racial dynamics of academia. ArXiv – a website where researchers across STEM fields post drafts of papers before publication – is one such institution. It usually sends an email announcement each night of all the new papers posted, but it cancelled the announcement for the evening of 9 June.
“I want a day where I don’t have to worry that I’ve missed an important paper on the arXiv because I am stressed out while my non-Black colleagues happily keep going,” said physicist, organiser and New Scientist columnist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein at the University of New Hampshire in a statement. “The strike is not just about gathering people together to begin to take action, but it is also about a day of rest for the people most affected by this heated moment.”
The organisers have built a web page with a number of resources and suggestions for actions that academics can take during the strike. The hope is that the day will be a jumping-off point to bring the issues that Black researchers face to the forefront and begin a long-lasting campaign of change.
“In the short-term we hope that non-Black academics take immediate action to fight against anti-Black racism,” says Ipek. “But this movement has to be sustained on a much longer timescale. Hundreds of years of anti-Black racism will not be erased from our Ivory Tower in one night.”
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