How might we dismantle the lie?
At Stanford’s d.school (design school), they teach people to orient toward other’s “point of view” and ask expansive questions that begin with, “How might we…?”. I came to this d.school course (Designing Courageous Conversations for Impact) to work on a question: How might I — as a Stanford PhD student — confront directly and unapologetically what James Baldwin, among others, called “the lie”?
What Baldwin called “the lie” is a pervasive and deeply held belief that we who are perceived as white are somehow superior to others. The lie is used as a tool to hide advantages and justify dominant positions for white people. I believe that we (all those at Stanford and in the United States) cannot and will not achieve racial justice until more of us (white folks, specifically) seriously confront this lie embedded in ourselves and our institutions. Of course, this starts with me. So I ask: How might I understand and identify “the lie” in myself and the systems I inhabit, name it, expose it, and create spaces in which others might do the same?
I understand that not everyone is comfortable examining how white supremacy has poisoned their heart. As a human who grew up in Ohio, and identifies as both a man and white, society has put much of this poison in my veins. I am constantly struggling to identify it and siphon it out.
The lie is in all of our veins, because we are in America. It is embedded in the U.S. Constitution (e.g., that Black Americans were counted as three-fifths of a person), financial institutions (e.g., delayed and underfunded crop loans to Black farmers), corporations (e.g., anti-Black bias in hiring and promotion), housing (e.g., redlining), criminal justice (e.g., the school-to-prison pipeline), and more. We white Americans might not see the lie’s poison because it is in the air we breathe. It is like the fish that asks, “what does water look like?” To see and taste the poison, for those who do not feel its pain constantly, requires sustained effort and discomfort. Without this, we white Americas may continue to breathe our supreme air without attending to the oppression we are allowing to continue.
In U.S. graduate schools, particularly in STEM, the lie is actively hidden by the idea of meritocracy. Ask yourself: How much do you believe that talent, hard work, and merit earned you the degrees, achievements, and position that you have? Have you truly examined the possibility that you have benefited from advantages throughout your life — advantages that other equally, or more, talented and hard-working people did not have access to? The belief of meritocracy is alive and well at Stanford. As it goes, the most talented people are accepted into Stanford, and once there, the most talented graduate students and postdocs will rise to the top, be the most productive, develop the most exciting research, publish the most cited work, and thereby earn the respect and accolades of their peers and professors.
The valorization of meritocracy may seem benign or even sensible, but we must look closely. A blind belief in meritocracy can obscure longstanding inequity. In some Stanford research labs, Black, Indigenous, and other graduate students of color are not given the same access to opportunities (e.g., exposure at conferences, access to high-impact projects), resources (e.g., regular constructive feedback, fellowship funding), and encouragement as their white peers. I have witnessed this first hand. Additionally, many are expected to contribute an unequal share of teaching (e.g., TAing many classes) and service duties (e.g., recruiting, mentoring rotation students, sitting on diversity committees). This has a term: “invisible labor.” Imagine being saddled with excessive teaching, service, and other duties with little time or funding for research — would you be especially creative or productive in such a situation? A blind belief in meritocracy obscures systemic inequities by perpetuating the assumption that all graduate students have equal access to resources and an equal burden of labor. Then differences in outcomes are assumed to be a product of a person’s talent, hard work, and other individual characteristics (grit, and so on). In this way, the coupled lies of meritocracy and white supremacy can systematically advantage white graduate students and systematically disadvantage graduate students of color.
That is why my teammates, Josselyn and Ilana, and I began working with others to develop a tool to hold such inequities exposed in plain sight. Of course, each research lab is different. Some are inspiringly equitable, and others are not. The equity assessment tool is an attempt to help us — graduate students, postdocs, and others — to understand equity within our labs and to hold lab groups accountable for continually improving. As engineer and CEO Alan Mulally said, “You can’t manage a secret,” and research labs are unlikely to improve unless each understands its unique challenges, experiments with change, and observes which changes yield progress towards a lab liberated from racism and the legacy of slavery. Our tool is an early prototype and not without problems, including how to effectively engage faculty and protect students and postdocs of color from further harm.
While I am excited about the potential of improved accountability systems, one thing is clear to me: racial equity, and the unbounded joy of a truly multiracial and multicultural Stanford, will not be achieved until a critical mass of its students, faculty, and staff have confronted the lie.
