A Way to Anti-Racism

My DEI work before Designing for an Anti-Racist Stanford has been largely focused on addressing systemic policy and mentorship issues: eliminating the gap in payment at the beginning of grad school, overcoming language barriers, improving mentor-mentee communication, and building intersections.

More recently I have been working with former grad school colleagues to advance a template of anti-racist actions that individual labs can take on without waiting for department approval: journal clubs, directed plans outlining a concrete path to publication. These efforts have been self-directed, but they have also been centered within STEM departments and groups.

I approached this course with multiple intentions:

· To build more intersections with Black researchers

· To dedicate time to anti-racist action rather than donating time sporadically

· Learn skills and pick up tools from a non-STEM framework

· And perhaps draw in allies to work on some of the actions I have been championing lately

I assumed that a design-centered class would give me a new analytical methodology: a rubric to break down and evaluate a university system. Rather than focusing on analysis, the design approach in this course sets out a workflow — not so much a toolkit, but a way. Like a buddhist meditation practice, each individual came with an intention and the course stepped through a series of actions that we molded to our intentions. This workflow is at times chaotic, but so is much of STEM research — the I Ching says that chaos is that from which all great things are born.

From letting myself be unsettled, I was more open to letting go of some of my preconceptions: that to address racism, we have to address the symptoms of inequity in terms of training, retention, and career progression. In stepping through the actions of the course, I had multiple opportunities to listen to students, and the message was consistent: policies are not the major barrier once a student arrives on campus — the major barrier is a continual erasure and degradation in interpersonal interactions between scientists. To address racism at academic institutions, we have to improve our behavior not our rules.