This annual event series, which was first held in 2021, brings the scientific community at NYU together to critically examine how scientists, past and present, have ignored, enabled, or promoted racist ideas and practices, and to learn how scientists can contribute to greater racial justice.
The workshop is sponsored by the NYU Department of Psychology, the Department of Biology, the Department of Chemistry, the Center for Data Science, and the Center for Neural Science. The series originated after extensive interdepartmental discussions in the Fall of 2020, among faculty, postdocs, and students. It was inaugurated in Spring 2021.
The Black Lives Matters movement has put a much-needed spotlight on the systemic racism against Black and Indigenous people across American institutions. The academic community has an obligation to fight racism on all fronts, not only by improving perceptions and representation of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC) and addressing racist behavior in the workplace, but also by educating each other on the role of race and racism in the history of science. Science does not exist in a vacuum, but in a context of social and cultural forces, some of which have been oppressive, exploitative, and dehumanizing. Across history and continuing today, prominent and less prominent scientists have taken part in racist ideologies and practices in the name of science. For example, genetics and IQ research have both been deeply intertwined with eugenics, people of color have been taken advantage of in medical trials, and racial biases of machine learning algorithms are often dismissed. Our communities have to confront these dark parts of scientific history and current practice, and such reckoning should become a permanent part of the education that we offer our trainees.