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Make no mistake: the resource phase is critical. When properly allocated, resources (especially economic ones) provide the necessary infrastructure to deal with long-standing problems. That is, resources do not seem to be the end of the conversation, but the beginning. Little can happen without them.
The question is, what do we do after being with them?
A year later When George Floyd was assassinated, Phase 3 is becoming more widespread: new job names have been created, new hires have been given the green light, and job vacancies are incredibly transparent about commitments to language anti-racism and diversity. But beyond these important advances — and I want to emphasize that all of them are important — we are moving into territories we do not know now.
Question 4 of this new phase is defining, are we still there? What exactly do we need to do, and how do we know we have progressed? Have we done a good job over the next five years if we hire indigenous computing? Few would doubt that this is a great sign. If enrollment of students with an identified disability doubles in the next two cohorts of graduate students, we should encourage it.
Here, too, we must be careful and examine the lesson Goodhart’s law: When a metric becomes a target, the metric is no longer useful.
If the low number of black or brown scientists indicates that the institutional culture is biased or unfavorable, then target those numbers only it’s not a way to change that culture. By expanding further, if you change the number of people’s black and brown faces, you may not change much.
But that is not entirely true. Surely it is an increase in the diversity of crowd faces part of purpose. Because the problems are so great, shock therapy that immediately increases the numbers can create critical mass. And a critical mass would at least alienate early career scientists from marginalized communities in their respective programs and professions. And by extension, the culture would change then.
Perhaps Phase 4 should make a rigorous assessment of our progress. Every sophisticated initiative that seeks to address a social illness requires the same (or more) sophisticated tool to measure whether that initiative is effective. Roads that go nowhere are also paved with the best of intentions (Phase 1 to 3).
Our assessment powers are also useless if we have not decided what the goal really is. Even more trivial: have we examined, in any of these phases, what problems we are trying to solve? By problem, I mean something more specific than “correcting systemic racism”.
This and all subsequent phases will succeed if we are cleaned up with an uncomfortable truth: institutional racism is very harmful because it hides in the margins of society, in ways that are often difficult to diagnose and legislate. Just because they are difficult to diagnose does not mean that they are so significant. The opposite could happen: it is difficult to diagnose racism on the margins, precisely because it embodies our entire universe and corrupts society from within.
This decay indicates how some of the initial fields are picked up when they come out of the mouths compared to others.
He lives to be an expert, and why we ask for credentials from some but others.
He lives on editorial boards and thesis and promotion committees.
It explains to students with similar talents or interests why they are advised differently, why some are encouraged to take on larger project challenges that have a greater capacity to grow.
Explains why one scientist is referred to as a polymath and the other an amateur for similar work.
He lives with how professional networks are built, often in social and informal settings. (I may not like IPAs, but I can take advantage of them after work chats).
It may inspire how black teachers aim to treat students who are trying to treat them or how they are trying to treat white health care workers.
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