Thread by @freeradsorg

Institutional Western science has stolen knowledge, technology, health, wellness, and life from Black people

Western science owes Black people reparations. A (nonexhaustive) THREAD:

#ScienceIsPolitical

First, let’s preface this thread with a few things. These are just a few of the anti-Black skeletons in institutional science’s closet

There’s a rich literature that goes much deeper and broader than what we’ll mention here, much of which is created by Black scholars

Additionally, we’ll be sharing a longer resource list later, but in this thread we’ll be naming Black scholars whose research is referenced in brackets in each tweet

Second, we’re sharing this as part of our Scientist Solidarity Drive, calling on non-Black scientists to support orgs and funds doing grassroots racial justice and abolition work

Take a second before reading to click through and contribute!

Lastly we want to recognize that the focus on Black suffering in media right now may be overwhelming for Black folks

We share these examples of past/present atrocities for folks who are unfamiliar with anti-Blackness in science/tech and who may want to learn more

For a coming respite from that, keep an eye out for a thread acknowledging, uplifting, and celebrating the science & the ways of knowing that come from Black communities - often in resistance to oppressive institutional science

We’ll start our examples here with 17th century white Americans stealing scientific knowledge and technologies of rice cultivation from Black communities in West Africa and exploiting their knowledge and labor for profit

Many community organizations & movements like Food Sovereignty Ghana & the West African Peasant Seed Fair have pointed out and are leading the fight against this continuing food exploitation like seed biotech patents leveraged by agri-corps and non-profits

Simultaneously, the transatlantic slave trade itself would not have been possible without the exploitation of Indigenous West Africans’ medical knowledge of topics like pharmacy, surgery, and herbalism [Carolyn Roberts]

Race, and Blackness specifically, were turned into “medically significant markers of difference” during this time to justify slavery

And medical knowledge was used to increase plantation efficiency and control over Black people [Rana A. Hogarth]

In 1932, U.S. public health officials enrolled 600 Black men in the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment

Told they would receive free healthcare, the men were actually enrolled to study the effects of syphilis & received no treatment

The 399 participants w/ syphilis were never even informed of their diagnosis

And as of 2018, reported syphilis rates in Black communities remain among the highest in the U.S.

The modern field of Western gynecology is based on similarly acquired knowledge from experiments on enslaved Black women performed without consent or anesthesia

And treatments developed from the results of these experiments were specifically made to treat white women

As of 2019, Black people die of pregnancy-related causes at a rate about 3 times higher than those of white people, in large part because Black people are still denied access to the same level of care as white people

And these medical examples are but a few of the manifestations of what @haw95 describes as a medical apartheid, linking historical and present anti-Black disparities and violence in Western clinical medicine

And Western institutional biomed would not be what it is today without HeLa cells, taken from Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman, in 1951 w/o her consent

She received poor care due to medical apartheid & died of her cancer, but her cells live on in research labs [@DorothyERoberts]

In computing technology today, bail and other risk assessment algorithms continually use Blackness as a “risk factor” when determining things like who is allowed to post bail, how much, and who is jailed before trial

Computer scientists create facial recognition algorithms that label Black people as criminals

Engineers develop cameras & drones that surveil/criminalize Black communities

Technologies that regardless of intent, perpetuate the anti-Black values of the society they’re developed in [@ruha9]

These examples drive home the point that institutional Western science has both an anti-Black history and an anti-Black present

Those of us involved in it must be a part of changing it and changing the structurally anti-Black society that it is inextricably part of

Of course, these are the easy examples to condemn right? But 1) all systems of Western knowledge production are connected

For example, earthquake models and anthropological research are used to develop anti-Black predictive policing systems...

... and 2) if we’re not actively working to stop the programs of scientific and technological surveillance, exploitation, and oppression that continue to target Black communities today, we’re part of the problem

There’s no neutral bystander

Folks like @stoplapdspying & @ColorCodedLA in LA and @AfroFuturAffair & @METROPOLARITY in Philly are just some of those who’ve BEEN doing the radical work of dismantling oppressive sci/tech & making liberatory alternatives

Follow them, join orgs local to you, do the work

Science doesn’t happen in a vacuum - supporting racial justice efforts outside of science is necessary for change within science, just as anti-racist work within science is necessary for societal change

One way you can support in this moment is by making donations to the drive mentioned at the top of the thread, running until next Fri, 6/19!

Free Radicals and partners are matching donations up to $5,010 to the funds in this graphic!

Make a donation to one of the funds in the graphic/through the links in this thread 👇

Then share your receipt at bit.ly/scientistsolid… so we can match your donation

Once you’ve donated, help us spread the word by sharing with your fellow scientists and by tagging #ScientistSolidarity and #BlackLivesMatter

Over these two weeks, we will be sharing educational threads on research justice, the role of institutional science in gentrification, concrete ways to take action, and more

In our next thread tomorrow, we’ll be sharing info about concrete ways non-Black scientists can work to dismantle anti-Blackness in solidarity with #ShutDownSTEM #ShutDownAcademia and #Strike4BlackLives

After that we’ll be highlighting the ways that Black communities/sciences/ways of knowing have always been at the forefront of resistance to the anti-Blackness and oppression of institutional science