First of all, I appreciated reading this, despite having to almost physically beat down every “BUT…
Dave M
163

Include and compare to the mistakes of white scientists, perhaps? If a potential problem is unique to the individual, call it out, but if this is part of a larger pattern, to only call out one person (especially if that person is underrepresented) is to unfairly target that person. Make sure the standards we set are about conduct and not about race, gender, class, and other factors that should be trivial when judging competence. If one of those factors seems to be relevant, imagine someone was accusing you and *your kind* of having a problem and run it through the same scrutiny you would if it was your own skin you were defending. Know that “different from the way white male colleagues do it” doesn’t mean “bad, wrong, or misguided” by default. Keep in mind that some deep socialization and cultural bias is in play when you feel the urge to question whether minorities are truly competent. In the quest for objectivity, scientists often assume they are being neutral when they most need to be questioning their actions. Human beings live and breathe subjectivity, one has to assume they are intensely, unavoidably subjective and work backwards from there.