A Reading Group to Remember - Summer 2020
By Raisa A. Rahim
In light of on-going police brutality and the murders of George Floyd and countless others, the SOMA (Seminar Outreach for Minority Advocacy) committee wanted to create a safe space for historically under-represented minority (URM) people to share (and for non-URM people to hear) their experiences with the goal of brainstorming ways to enact real change. The following is a recap of our first bi-weekly reading group with potential action-items that attendees collaboratively proposed.
We started off strong with an article titled "Don't Talk About Implicit Bias Without Talking About Structural Racism". This piece highlighted the broad range of biases we hold, the different lenses we see them through, and how they lead to the persistence of structural inequities. Specifically, the authors used the metaphor of “mirror and window” for internal and external reflection, respectively. This allows people to reflect upon personal and systemic biases to combat these discriminatory practices “from the inside-out”. These implicit biases are fueled by priming (e.g. the media we consume), associations (based on our cultural experience and sources of priming), and assumptions (e.g. evolutionary- and neurobiologically-rooted heuristics). These forces come together to form a pernicious feedback loop: priming, associations, and assumptions historically informed policies that produced social inequalities often along racial lines, which perpetuated their prevalence, which… As the system has been largely resistant to progressive feedback to produce a more equitable society, these harmful practices have persisted until the present-day.
A major obstacle to progress is that the people who do not participate in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) forums are often the ones who are most in need of the training. One way to incentivize progress may be to require fulfillment of a “cultural proficiency” credit as a checkbox when under consideration for a promotion at all academic levels. In order to create an environment where people can feel free to share their concerns about DEI issues in the workplace, these kinds of conversations must be normalized. This may be done through forums like this one, chat rooms, etc.
The commentary "Exaggerating Harmful Drug Effects on the Brain is Killing Black People" argued that hyperbolic narratives by scientists are being used to maintain systems that promote the oppression of Black people. A poignant example of this is the impacts section in grant applications. Though this section was likely intended to make researchers think about the implications of their work, the reality is that it creates an arms race to frame research in the most fundable (read “attention-grabbing”) manner that often overstates the scope of its merits and applications. The same holds for manuscript discussions, where flashier narratives attract high-profile journals (or the other way around). As the author highlights, science communicators often do not have the depth of knowledge that researchers do, so they are likely to take the scientists’ words at face value. This produces a game of scientific telephone, where the science is prone to distortion. In the case of pharmaceutical research, this distortion perpetuates discriminatory policies and attitudes that particularly prey on the Black community and other URM groups. As we learned last session, faulty logic has a way of sticking around - best to nip it in the bud.
As scientists, we are looked to as experts. The general public may not be able to critically analyze our words to the same degree as other academics. Simply put, we must resist the urge to overstate our findings in order to minimize the margin of error. Along the same lines, we need to increase transparency in both data collection and communication to start eroding the mistrust of scientists. We can address the stigma surrounding many public health issues by normalizing, de-criminalizing, and de-moralizing the issue. Learn about how the criminal justice system is failing people with drug addictions in this article by the ACLU’s Human Rights Watch.
The paper "Graduate Students of Color: Race, Racism, and Mentoring in the White Waters of Academia" highlighted the challenges of mentor-mentee relationships (from both parties’ perspectives) in a diverse academe. These relationships are inherently prone to problems. One reason is that PIs rarely received formalized mentorship training - one faculty member said that they learned from experience what works and what does not. So since there are no “standardized” good practices, several interpersonal factors may come into play. Depending on the PI’s personality, the mentor may see their mentorship role ranging anywhere from supportive to adversarial. Between cultural differences and an imbalanced power dynamic between mentor/ mentee, what was meant to be an intellectually nurturing relationship can become fraught with miscommunications at best and discriminatory negligence at worst.
Grad students: form mentorship networks to find advisors who appreciate your cultural capital. If you need additional support, scope out people who can serve as auxiliary mentors, be they other students, postdoctoral fellows, or faculty members. Advisors: be cognizant of trainees’ intersectionalities and complex needs - no one person can wear every hat. Hiring committees: hiring and retaining faculty members from diverse backgrounds is crucial to mitigating these intercultural misunderstandings. Diversity of experience brings diversity of thought. Diversity of thought sparks novel ideas. Learn about the “edge effect”: how diversity of experience fosters creativity and innovation.
We then broadened our scope in "Race, Disability and the School-to-Prison Pipeline", which talked about how URM children in K-12 education are more likely to be labeled as having a cognitive-emotional disability that ultimately increases the likelihood of their being arrested. Without taking the child’s context (i.e. home environment) into account, persistent disturbances in the classroom may appear to be due to a behavioral disorder. This is exacerbated by overcrowded and underfunded school systems. Even with the best intentions, teachers are hard-pressed to send the “problem child” to a special education class where they can get more tailored instruction for their needs and minimize disturbance in the general education classroom. This approach is problematic: vague criteria lead children to be mislabeled, finite resources are drawn from children who “really” need it, the future prospects for children placed in special education are unknown, etc.
One way to address this issue is by expanding the hybrid general-and-special-education system and/ or programs such as the one discussed in the article that aim to holistically address students’ needs through parent-teaching meetings and interventions by counselors assigned to struggling students. Beyond increasing the diversity of teachers, culturally sensitive modes of testing (e.g. those that do not penalize and devalue African American Vernacular English when that is the linguistic context that students are immersed in) need to be developed and distributed. Learn how recognizing these commonly used dialects in schools may help close the literacy gap between Black and White students.
In “The Costs of Code-Switching”, we talked about how URM members often feel the need to selectively show and mask their true personalities in the workplace so as to behave in an “appropriate” manner. This is problematic because the (white cis-male) majority culture has historically dictated what is “appropriate” or “professional”, thereby discounting and devaluing all other modus operandi. This puts the burden on URM individuals to figure out which personality Rubik’s cube-conformation to use as a public face in any one moment to succeed in such a system. The article outlines three main ways why URM people are driven to code-switch: 1) to avoid acting in a way that adheres to stereotypes, 2) to assimilate to the workplace culture or to support their leadership aspirations, and 3) to head off any discriminatory behavior by others. With all these considerations, it is not surprising that URM individuals experience high levels of psychological trauma and burnout. But it must be kept in mind that a color-blind organization is not the solution to stopping URM inequality (see “Keep Your Friends Closer”). As the hosts of the Rad Scientist put it, “If you have to sacrifice any part of yourself, then you’re not doing your best work”.
There are several nodes in the academic network that can be changed to reduce the pressure on URM members to code-switch. In the lab, PIs should be encouraged to share personal details with trainees as a way to “break the ice” and reduce the power differential to encourage trainees to bring up tougher DEI-related issues and exhibit their true personalities. In admissions, incorporating holistic review of applicants will also advance this cause by allowing applicants to be valued beyond a “cookie-cutter” archetype. Extending further, faculty promotions should reward mentoring success (beyond students’ career outcomes) as a qualitative measure of program success in addition to the traditional quantitative ones.
Discussing the importance of accounting for culture in research, "We Aren’t the World" presented evidence that the participant pool currently supporting human research is woefully misrepresentative of humans worldwide, skewing the search for “universal truths” in behavior. One cited study said that 96% of studies are done on 12% of the global population, with Americans as 70% of all subjects. Americans are WEIRD (“Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic”), making us “outliers among outliers”. Though the piece did not discuss structural and functional neural differences across populations, they showed how cross-cultural differences in environmental context bias visual perception. This underscores the importance of scientific diversity at every stage of the scientific process - the final output is only as strong as the input that the claims are based on.
Researchers must strive to recruit a diverse range of participants. This may follow after increasing the diversity of researchers to counteract historic abuses of vulnerable populations. Increasing international collaboration may also protect against myopic Western-centric conclusions being drawn. Better reporting of the demographic makeup of a study’s subject pool may also help - though it may seem irrelevant to the present study, it may provide crucial context to the literature as a whole. Big data and online experiments may lower scientists’ activation energy needed to recruit in populations who were previously challenging to access (though the interaction with socioeconomic status sets limits). Looking forward, maybe we need to stop pursuing a “universal truth” - people are not a monolith, so it is an overgeneralization to average across the vast diversity of experiences.
Bringing us home, we learned of the various initiatives that the National Institutes of Health, etc. have developed to increase DEI in academia in “NINDS Strategies for Enhancing the Diversity of Neuroscience Researchers”. While some initiatives focus on recruiting more diverse applicants, the NIH D-SPAN F99/K00 program supports researchers through the transition from graduate student to postdoctoral fellow, a point where diverse researchers tend to leave academia. Though this is a valuable resource, it also brings up the faulty logic of the “leaky pipeline” analogy. This systemic perspective is problematic because 1) leaving academia is not a personal failing - it is simply applying a skill set in a different context, with different goals in mind, and 2) this passive “leak” does not acknowledge that URM people are often actively driven out or not integrated into the system. This highlights that pushing for diversity without inclusion is only fighting half the battle for equality.
As stated above, increased participation in DEI initiatives is crucial for substantive change to occur. Creating an anonymous platform to ask for help with science, get mentoring advice, etc. to be maintained by fellow grad students might mitigate the fact that imposter syndrome is highly prevalent among grad students (see Weir, 2013). Faculty members and administrators should also be receptive to trainees’ concerns.
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Thank you to everyone for participating in our first (of many, we hope!) quarterly SOMA Reading Group. Your insightful comments, creative mindsets, and passionate conversations will hopefully inspire change for the better as we apply what we have learned to our future endeavors.
As always, you can find the articles discussed in this summer session, as well as many other resources to educate yourself about topics related to DEI issues in academia and beyond, on the SOMA website.
The UC Davis Neuroscience Graduate Group has made headway in furthering DEI initiatives, but there is always more to be done. So we hope you bring your thinking caps along in the Fall!
References:
Brennan, W. (2018). Julie Washington’s Quest to Get Schools to Respect African-American English. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/the-code-switcher/554099/
Butrymowicz, S. & Mader, J. (2017). Low academic expectations and poor support for special education students are ‘hurting their future’. https://hechingerreport.org/low-academic-expectations-poor-support-special-education-students-hurting-future/.
Keep Your Friends Closer (2020). [Code Switch]. https://www.npr.org/2020/08/18/903718460/keep-your-friends-closer.
Human Rights Watch (2016). Every 25 Seconds: The Human Toll of Criminalizing Drug Use in the United States.
Schmidt, J., Vedantam, S. Shah, P. & Boyle, T. (2018). The Edge Effect [Hidden Brain]. https://www.npr.org/2018/07/02/625426015/the-edge-effect.
Weir, K. (2013). Feel Like a Fraud?. American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/gradpsych/2013/11/fraud
Rad Scientist (2020). Rad Scientist is Back! https://www.kpbs.org/podcasts/rad-scientist/2020/aug/26/rad-scientist-back/