What is the plan for including Tamir Rice in #STEM?
An unfinished dirge
I wrote the first draft of this essay 18 months ago. I can’t finish it. He was shot three years ago today. Here is my essay in unfinished rawness.
Tamir Rice was 12 and sitting on a playground playing with a toy gun when a police officer drove up and within seconds shot him to death.
I was not allowed to play with guns as a child. My mom did not want me to become used to the toys of war and death. But I think also my justifiably paranoid mother did not want me to be shot on a playground one day. She should not have needed to be so careful.
Due to a nonlinear combination of luck, skin color, test taking skills, and social capital, I survived into adulthood, long enough to go to Harvard, long enough to get a PhD in theoretical physics, long enough to be a postdoc at MIT, long enough to get hate mail for speaking out against racism in science, long enough to see the rise of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and the extreme cowardice of the scientific community in the face of pretty much all the data you could ever need until forever that racist, murderous policing is a thing.
I learned recently that the American Geophysical Union believes that stating that #BlackLivesMatter is outside their purview, but also they want us to know that they are committed to inclusion.
So, I have a question: what is the plan for including Tamir Rice in STEM? Are they aware that it is hard for dead Black children to become scientists? Are they aware that it is hard for Philando Castile to encourage his daughter to become a scientist? Are they aware that Alton Sterling’s children no longer have a father to help pay for the books that might open their minds to science?
I also learned recently that the American Astronomical Society actually has nothing to say about #BlackLivesMatter, but an extremely short letter from the President of AAS suggests that “people of color” are suffering right now. Well yes, this is true. Asian Americans are experiencing racist bullying and being white washed out of their own stories. But are they also dealing with being systematically shot by police for being born? Not really. I think what I learned was that the President of AAS thought that mentioning Black people was politically hazardous, that acknowledging us and our lives was dangerous.
Perhaps she has a point, given that the police seem to agree that we are a danger, in general.
So also, there was a mention of Orlando, but I have to say as the only person on any of AAS’s committees — the queer one too! — who is openly queer and either Black or Latino, your statement is a month late, if you really want me to believe you give a fuck about that, the time was in June. It’s July. In the time since the Pulse shooting — where most of the victims were likely Afro-Latino and the perpetrator was a member of the policing industry — I have spent a week in Taiwan, a week in Korea, two weeks in Seattle, and a couple of days in Boston.
Did you really have to think that long about whether Latinx and Black and Afro-Latinx lives mattered? Actually, I don’t think AAS thought about it at all. I think that in the last week what AAS thought was that Black is a dirty word and Black Lives Matter an even dirtier phrase, and they would do anything, including drag queer people into it, to avoid saying that my life matters, queer or not.
But there were also some comments about making sure our community is inclusive. So again, I have a question: what is the American Astronomical Society’s plan for including Tamir Rice in science? Do they know something about zombies and bringing people back from the dead that I do not? They’re scientists, so maybe they do. But if they do, I feel like they’re withholding, and that’s kind of fucked up.
In that case, can we bring back Aiyana Stanley-Jones, who was shot because she was Black and seven years old and sleeping in her bed at home?
Also, how about Rekiya Boyd? It might be that she was going to take a physics class one day that would change her life. And maybe then she would have changed ours.
If your commitment to inclusion and diversity is somehow relevant to avoiding stating that Black Lives Matter, I want to know what it is. Will it somehow ensure that there isn’t another Aiyana? Will it stop the Baton Rouge police from trying to intimidate people out of recording their brutal, hateful anti-Black violence?
I can imagine a scenario where one could believe that a plan for inclusion that does not include a plan for radical change would actually lead to preventing another Aiyana Stanley-Jones from being snuffed out too early. It’s a ridiculous scenario where without any serious changes to underlying systems of white supremacy practicing affirmative action and having a committee on the status of minorities in your organization leads to more Black people becoming physicists and then because more Black people are physicists they are respectable and not people who are making police shoot them when they are seven years old. Magic, voila, why didn’t we think of that first? Thank G-d for the multimillion dollar diversity and inclusion industry.
Let’s be real though. These professional societies don’t have a plan for including Tamir Rice or Aiyana Stanley-Jones in STEM, and I don’t either because they’re dead. They were murdered by police officers who faced no serious legal repercussions for killing Black children because to the system, to you who refuses to oppose it, their lives were nothing but the smudges of a pathetic second class of post-slaves that you call African-Americans, because you’re polite.
I don’t need your inclusion plan. I need to know that my cousin isn’t going to die because he’s Black. I need to not feel so terrified by the police that adrenaline rushes into my mouth and then I can’t drive properly and risk getting into a car accident. I need to not be so terrified that I will be raped if I get pulled over by police in a rural area or that if my tail light goes out I might end up dead in jail with a coroner saying I hanged myself because I had a history of mental problems.
What’s the plan for including Sandra Bland in STEM?
The only plan to include me in STEM is the one that looks past the living and speaks to the dead and says we are going to mourn for you and fight like hell for those you left behind.
I have volunteered as a committee member for AAS for about 5 years and in that time paid you about $1000 in membership dues and you are not fighting for me. You are talking some mess about “people of color.” So look, since I’m a theoretical physicist, I’ve taken classes that include some set theory, and I can tell you as a matter of logic that Black people are a subset that are contained in people of color. That means you had the option of saying Black people in your statements because you were at least in part referring to Black people. African Americans, if you must feel safe and not like you are using that term that sounds a little too much like oh my god are they the Panthers demanding equal rights?
But you think I’m not nice enough about this.
You know what nice is? Acknowledging the movement that is trying to save my life, possibly from people like you.
Happy Thanksgiving. Enjoy your family members who haven’t been murdered and don’t need to worry about being murdered because of their race. Enjoy your boys who will in fact be allowed to be boys.
