Daniel Colón-Ramos got the email just a few hours before he was due to lecture before a class of minority students in neuroscience at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), in Woods Hole. A teaching assistant had been expelled after threatening to burn a cross in front of an African-American student’s home. It’s an incident that might seem shocking to many, but to Colón-Ramos, it was the response that stood out.
As a Latino scientist who has studied and worked at some of the nation’s most prestigious institutions – Harvard, Duke, Stanford, and Yale (where he is currently an associate professor of cell biology and neuroscience) – he has experienced and seen many examples of discrimination. In fact, he and Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa, a professor and neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins University, had been working for several months on a New York Times op-ed piece about widespread racism in research labs.
In that piece, Colón-Ramos and Quiñones-Hinojosa credited MBL with “assertive leadership, transparency and fairness that is lacking in many other institutions in which we have worked.” In fact, Colón-Ramos says MBL is one place where this kind of incident does come as a surprise.
“MBL has a rich history of inclusion, both of minorities and women, a history that goes back one hundred years,” says Colon-Ramos. “When most institutions did not allow minorities and women to do science in them, MBL was actually opening its doors to everyone who could contribute ideas.”
But the rest of academia has been slow to follow suit, and Colón-Ramos says it would be a mistake to get too wrapped up in the details of any one event.
“This is not about MBL, or this particular incident,” he says. “It’s about a larger problem that we have in science, which is that we are losing a lot of underrepresented minorities in science, we’re losing women in science. And we have to wonder why that is happening.”
Colón-Ramos says minority students and young scientists are exhausted by coping with pervasive racism, both in and out of the lab, on top of the demands of their studies. Furthermore, Colón-Ramos argues that discrimination is embedded in the very institutions and practices of academia, which he says “were designed to serve a very narrow demographic.”
As is often the case, Colón-Ramos says the first step toward changing the situation is acknowledging it. So, when he showed up to class that afternoon, he briefly introduced himself and his research, and then shared with the group some of his thoughts on the prevalence of racism in science.
“Immediately, by the body language of the students, I realized that the incident had happened to somebody there,” says Colón-Ramos. “So I opened up the floor for discussion.”
Colón-Ramos says there was a brief hesitation, and then the student involved spoke up. What ensued was a productive conversation about racism in research and the importance of diversity in science.
But one discussion can’t be the end of the story. Colón-Ramos says he has witnessed progress, and he doesn’t take it for granted. But change doesn’t happen on its own. Academic leaders, he says, need to decide that diversity is an important issue and address it head on, openly, and persistently. To do otherwise, he says, would be “to the detriment of science and society.”