A good place to start: Dr. Ibram X Kendi leads the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research.
Want to make change in your own community? My friend Wayne Barnaby has been meeting with university administration at all levels to effect change in line with the petition he created during the Summer of 2020. Today, his call to action has over 3,000 supporters. A follow-up resource list was compiled in this document written by a few community members at UMass Amherst.
Additionally, the Socially Just Science (SJS) collective at UMass Amherst collected the following resources for a 5-week workshop on how race is viewed in research:
- Fatal Invention excerpt by Dorothy Roberts (51 short pages)
- The problem with race-based medicine | Dorothy Roberts Ted Talk (14 min)
- Heteropatriarchy and the three pillars of white supremacy by Andrea Smith (7 pages)
- Indigenous knowledge and science revisited by Aikenhead & Ogawa: Introduction (pp. 539 – 552) & Conclusion: caveats, comparisons, and critiques (pp. 578 – 587) (21 pages)
- From park bench to lab bench – What kind of future are we designing? | Ruha Benjamin | TEDxBaltimore (21 minutes)
- The myth of Aboriginal stories being myths | Jacinta Koolmatrie | TEDxAdelaide (11 mins)
- Indigenous People’s History of the United States excerpt by Dunbar-Ortiz: This Land (pp. 1-14) (14 pages)
- THE CHARACTERISTICS OF WHITE SUPREMACY CULTURE from Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups, by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun, ChangeWork, 2001
- NeuroRacism Panel and the #NeuroRacism Journal Club recordings from #BlackInNeuroWeek.
- Inclusive Astronomy
- Intersectionality as a Blueprint for Postcolonial Scientific Community Building
- Black Maternal and Infant Health: Historical Legacies of Slavery
- Fostering Responsible Research on Ancient DNA
The SJS workshop included creating our own web of Research Justice using this pdf worksheet to interrogate our research practices, keeping in mind the framework for thinking about decolonization:
I like to add the “Repeat” section at the end because it is a loop in which scientists find themselves rewarded for a specific way of thinking that perpetuates to gain future similarly contaminated rewards such as publications, funding, formal acknowledgement, speaking invitations, etc.
Since that workshop, I’ve read the book “Jews Don’t Count” by David Baddiel, which you can find on apple books for under $7. For a brief summary:
Some people consider Jewish people as a well-off White group that shouldn’t be considered in these contexts. Other people consider Jewish people as an ethnic minority group whose blood dirties White Aryan lines. We are White or not only when it’s convenient to the argument. And many Jewish people today live closeted for fear of deadly consequences, silently internalizing conflicting rhetoric that we both rule the world and whine rather than help ourselves or others. That rhetoric is alive and well in recent US presidents and celebrities who have expressed intent to run for presidency including Donald Trump and Kanye West. At the same time, people are growing fatigued of hearing about the Holocaust. Just like COVID fatigue, your exhaustion of hearing about it doesn’t mean that the problem as gone away. So I am adding modern reference material on anti-semitism to this anti-racism page.
This is not an exhaustive list, but simply a place to start.
Science by Emma Dauster 