STEM Keynote

As I mentioned, a couple of Saturdays ago I gave the keynote address at a one-day conference designed to introduce STEM Careers to underrepresented students from various neighboring schools. The event* was co-sponsored by the Level Playing Field Institute, but sadly the details of it seem to have vanished from their site now that the event has passed, which is unfortunate. It was good to see a room full of enthusiastic students wanting to learn more about such careers (STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and I tried to give some thoughts about some of the reasons that there’s such poor representation by people of color (the group I was asked to focus on, although I mentioned that many of my remarks also extended to women to some extent) in such fields, and what can be done about it. Much of my focus, as you can guess from the issues I bring up here from time to time, was on battling the Culture: The perception people have of who “belongs” and who does not, and how that perception makes people act, consciously or otherwise, the images we as a society present and perpetuate in our media and in our conversations and conventions throughout everyday life, and so on. I used my own experience as an example at various points, which may or may not have been helpful – I don’t know.

My experience, in part and in brief, is this: I went a long way into being excited about science and just enjoying doing it and developing the habit of thinking like a scientist very early on in my youth before it ever occurred to me to think about who else does it, and whether it was “normal” for me to be doing science or not. I did well, in my view, not because of having any particularly special abilities (I’m pretty ordinary, in fact – I just have an open mind about what is possible for a person to achieve with hard work, and I am curious, like many) but because I was not surrounded by a culture (of media, peers, family friends) that was showing me that black boys are “supposed” to be excellent at sports and music and entertainment, and “not supposed” to be into science, mathematics… the love of ideas, and all those other areas of the culture in which we are expected to perform poorly in by so many people (sometimes even ourselves, by osmosis). My central point is that this situation was entirely accidental – I am from England, but I spent ages 4 – 14 on a tiny island in the Caribbean: crucially, it was in the pre-internet age, and with family circumstances that meant we could not afford a TV. That isolation from the larger culture, in retrospect, was a fantastic gift. The other gift was simply that my family appreciated a good education and so the fact that I was reading something, not raising warning flags in school, and staying out of trouble was enough for them. They just let me be. A lot (but not all) of what I was reading was science, but I don’t think anyone really knew what I was reading, and probably they (rightly) did not care. Frankly, I don’t think most people on that island (at least among the circles of people I and my family had contact with) had a clue as to what it meant to have a career as a scientist and so they also were not biased with expectations about what the cultural norms of what a scientist is supposed to “look like”. So I just missed out on all that stereotyping and just carried on with my interests.

By time I got exposed to all of the awful biases and cultural imagery when I went back to the UK, I was 14 and already had built myself some armour – a thick skin composed mostly of sheer joy of thinking, and applying it to questions about how the world works. I certainly needed that thick skin for what was to come almost immediately I got there and went to secondary school and beyond (right up until the present day), but that’s another story…

The point was that I found a path. It was not easy, but I found a way through, and that early foundation helped me. I described all this, and was then, based on the above thesis, able to offer some thoughts about how the young people assembled might begin (if they already had not) building their own armour**.

-cvj

*Photo by Yo-Yo Lin
**Those thoughts did not involve building a time machine and going back to age 4 and then hiding on an isolated island.