I’m a Black Female Scientist. On My First Day of Work, a Colleague Threatened to Call the Cops on Me. – Mother Jones
▻https://www.motherjones.com/anti-racism-police-protest/2020/06/blackintheivory-racism-academia-science-stem
https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/science-racism_2000_B.jpg?w=1200&h=630&crop=1 Over the past few weeks, a new hashtag has emerged on Twitter: #BlackintheIvory, a reference to being Black in the ivory tower of academia, which was first shared by two Black women in communications research. It has been posted thousands of times as the racial reckoning sparked by the police killing of George Floyd on May 25 spreads far beyond policing into industries like media, entertainment, food, tech, and more. Most of the tweets are from Black students, professors, researchers, and scholars sharing their stories of experiencing racism in the workplace and classroom: Getting passed over for jobs, or confused with maintenance staff, or called by the name of the one other Black person in their department.
Among the most widely shared tweets were those from Raven Baxter. “Raven the Science Maven,” as she is known on the internet, is currently the director of collegiate STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) initiatives at a charter school in Buffalo, New York, the founder of science advocacy organization STEMbassy, and a musician whose rap music, she hopes, inspires other Black women in science. (Her music video, “Big Ole Geeks,” is a treasure.)
Here, in her own words, she recounts her time as a corporate research scientist at a drug company in western New York—a job she left in 2017 in part because of its toxic culture. Afterward, she went into academia as an assistant professor of biology at a community college, also in western New York, where on her first day a white co-worker threatened to call the police on her. Today, she is hopeful the uprising we’re seeing across the country will bring real, lasting change, including in higher education. Her story here has been edited and condensed.