Getting Started
This is a page with resources for promoting anti-racism and supporting diversity and inclusion in Biology. If you're looking for information on anti-racism in general, please check out our Anti-Racism Research Subject Guide or our page on Diversity and Anti-Racism in STEM.
On this guide, there are five sections, each with a selection of resources and many with a link to a larger list: Articles & Web Resources, Books, Podcasts & Media, Organizations, and Support at Northeastern. If you're not finding what you need, you can get help from your subject librarian.
You can also find subject specific guides for the following disciplines: Bioinformatics, Biotechnology, Chemistry, Engineering, Environmental Science, Health Informatics, Health Sciences, Marine Science, and Physics.
The resources listed here are not comprehensive, and they inevitably reflect the biases of the various creators. They are intended to provide guidance to a wide variety of resources within STEM. This page is by no means exhaustive and will be continuously updated. Please reach out to us with your feedback and suggestions.
Articles & Web Resources
Below are a selection of articles and web resources related to anti-racism and supporting diversity in STEM. It is not meant to be comprehensive. For more research articles, try searching within the library's databases related to your discipline. You can also try some of the suggested databases on the Anti-Racism Guide. You can find additional suggestions on the Diversity and Anti-Racism in STEM page.
- Racism: Overcoming Science's Toxic Legacy (Opens in new window)A special issue from Nature, published in October 2022.
- 10 simple rules for building an antiracist labAn article written by Dr. V. Bala Chaudhary and Dr. Asmeret Asefaw Berhe published in PLoS Computational Biology in October 2020.
- Achieving Diversity in Research (Nature Collection)This collection of articles, a collaboration between Nature Research and Scientific American, focuses on the barriers faced by women and how they might be overcome, but also includes articles about the challenges encountered by other underrepresented groups in science.
- How Gender and Race Stereotypes Impact the Advancement of Scholars in STEM: Professors’ Biased Evaluations of Physics and Biology Post-Doctoral CandidatesEaton, A.A., Saunders, J.F., Jacobson, R.K. et al. How Gender and Race Stereotypes Impact the Advancement of Scholars in STEM: Professors’ Biased Evaluations of Physics and Biology Post-Doctoral Candidates. Sex Roles 82, 127–141 (2020). https://doi-org.ezproxy.neu.edu/10.1007/s11199-019-01052-w
- 1000 Inspiring Black Scientists in AmericaA list published in Cell Mentor in December 2020. Two previous lists of 100 Inspiring Black Scientists in America were published by Dr. Antentor O. Hinton Jr. in Cell Mentor in February 2020 and June 2020.
- 500 Queer ScientistsA visibility campaign for LGBTQ+ people and their allies working in STEM and STEM-supporting jobs. Working to ensure the next STEM generation has LGBTQ+ role models; help the current generation recognize they’re not alone; create opportunities for community connections and greater visibility within STEM. Their stories are searchable.
- 500 Women ScientistsThe mission of 500 Women Scientists is to serve society by making science open, inclusive, and accessible and transform society by fighting racism, patriarchy, and oppressive societal norms. Gage is a resource for journalists, educators, policy makers and others seeking the expertise of women and gender minorities STEMM professionals.
- Racism in Medicine and HealthcareA guide to anti-racist resources at UNLV and beyond to promote racial and ethnic equity in medicine and healthcare
Podcasts & Media
Below are a selection of podcast episodes, series, and seasons relevant to racism in STEM. This is not a comprehensive list. For more resources, please visit our Anti-Racism Research Subject Guide.
- Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research (SABER) Webinar Series A multi-part webinar series run in both 2020 and 2021 focused on promoting awareness, understanding and commitment to change academic biology environments to be more inclusive.
- Dope Lab Podcast, Episode 025 Skin Deep We often encounter a line of thinking that suggests science is always impartial or completely objective. Reader, I have news for you - that is not the case. Our guest expert Angela Saini, is an award-winning science journalist and has been featured in The Sunday Times, Nature, New Scientist, National Geographic and Wired. She is the author of Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and Superior: The Return of Race Science.
- On the Vanguard: Conversations with Women of Color in STEM An online community devoted to encouraging conversations between emerging & established women of color in STEM. #VanguardSTEM is an online network and empowered community of women of color, girls of color and non-binary people of color living at the intersections and thriving on the STEM frontier.
- Radio Lab Podcast, The Liberation of RNA In June of 2019, Brandon Ogbunu got on stage and told a story for The Story Collider, a podcast and live storytelling show. Starting when he was a senior in college being shook down by a couple cops, Brandon tells us about navigating his ups and downs of a career in science, his startling connection to scientific racism, and his battle against biology's central dogma.
- Lady Science Podcast Episode 11: Scientific Racism and the Myth of Raw Data In this episode, the hosts talk about the history of the IQ test and how disparities in intelligence have been used as a tool of oppression against people of color. Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble joins in to talk about her book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, which explores how Google and other search engines are engineered to marginalize women of color, particularly black women.
- Rad Scientist This season is centered on Black scientists, from graduate students to faculty to those who have left the ivory towers. They study bug microbiomes, autism, neural prosthetics and more. But they will also discuss how racism has impacted their scientific journey. To cap off the season, we will examine the root of inequity in STEM academia and what we can do moving forward to ensure a more diverse and inclusive ecosystem where science can serve everyone.
- Short Wave: Want To Dismantle Racism In Science? Start In The Classroom Some of the most prestigious scientists in history advanced racist and eugenicist views. But why is that rarely mentioned in textbooks? Today on the show, we speak with science educators building an anti-racist perspective into their curriculum and seeking to make the science classroom more inclusive.
- Through The Window And Into The Mirror: Narratives Of African American STEM Professionals Through the Window and into the Mirror is a video conversation series about the experiences of African American STEM professionals today. Students will peer into the ‘windows’ of the speakers’ lives, learn from their lived experiences as STEM professionals, and find parts of their culture and lifestyle ‘mirrored’ in the speakers’ lessons of their youth and greatest challenges and accomplishments. Through the Window and into the Mirror aims to inform, inspire, and be a starting point for students as they take steps towards having careers in STEM.
Books
Below are a selection of books relevant to racism in STEM. This is not a comprehensive list. For more books, search Scholar OneSearch or visit our Anti-Racism Research Subject Guide.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine: The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb's effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. Henrietta's family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family--past and present--is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of. Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family--especially Henrietta's daughter Deborah. Deborah was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Had they killed her to harvest her cells? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn't her children afford health insurance? Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.
ISBN: 9781400052172Publication Date: 2010
Just Medicine by
Over 84,000 black and brown lives are needlessly lost each year due to health disparities, the unfair, unjust, and avoidable differences between the quality and quantity of health care provided to Americans who are members of racial and ethnic minorities and care provided to whites. Health disparities have remained stubbornly entrenched in the American health care system-and inJust Medicine, Dayna Bowen Matthew finds that they principally arise from unconscious racial and ethnic biases held by physicians, institutional providers, and their patients.
ISBN: 9781479896738Publication Date: 2015
Successful STEM Mentoring Initiatives for Underrepresented Students by
Successful STEM Mentoring Initiatives for Underrepresented College Studentsis a step-by-step, research-based guide for higher education faculty and administrators who are charged with designing mentoring programs to recruit and retain students from underrepresented groups. Written by an acknowledged expert in the field of STEM mentoring, the book constitutes a virtual consultant that enables readers to diagnose the issues they face, identify priorities, and implement appropriate practices to achieve their goals. The book describes the real and perceived barriers that underrepresented students--to include women, students of color, transfer students, and first-generation college students--encounter when considering enrollment, or participating, in science courses; considers the issues they face at the various transitions in their education, from entering college to declaring a major and moving on to a profession; and sets out the range of mentoring options available to program designers. By posing key questions and using three running case illustrations of common dilemmas, the book walks readers through the process of matching the best design options with the particular needs and resources of their own department or campus. Intentionally brief and to the point, the book is nonetheless a comprehensive guide to the full range mentoring models and best practices, that also covers issues of institutional and departmental climate and teaching methods, and offers insider insights to help designers avoid pitfalls as they create effective, sustainable mentoring initiatives. This guide will assist administrators working on new initiatives to broaden access and improve persistence and graduation in their programs, as well as apply for research grants, by clarifying objectives and identifying the effective evidence-based practices to achieve them. It also provides common conversation-starters for departments to identify obstacles to enrollment and broaden participation.
ISBN: 9781620362983Publication Date: 2015
Science in Black and White : How Biology and Environment Shape our Racial Divide by
This unflinching expose of racially biased research--the Alt-Right's "scientific wing"--debunks both old and emerging claims of inborn racial disparities.Racial groups differ in some of their social patterns, but the cause of those differences--nature versus nurture, or genetics versus environment-- remains fiercely debated. For the pro-nature camp-- sometimes aligned with white nationalism and eugenics, and often used to promote ideas of racial inferiority and superiority -- race-based biological determinism contributes significantly to the ethnic divide, especially the black/white gap in societal achievement. By contrast, pro-nurture supporters attribute ethnic variation in social outcomes primarily to environmental circumstances, ecological conditions, and personal experience. In this thoroughly researched book, science writer Alondra Oubre examines emerging scientific discoveries that show how both biology and environment interact to influence IQ--intelligence performance--and social behaviors across continental populations, or human races. She presents compelling evidence for why environmental and certain non-DNA-related biological phenomena overall seem to best explain black/white disparities in a gamut of social behaviors, including family structure, parenting, educational attainment, and rates of violent crime. As she demonstrates, nature still matters, but the biology that impacts racial variance in social behaviors extends beyond genetics to include other processes--epigenetics, gene expression, and plasticity--all of which are profoundly affected by a wide array of environmental forces. The complex, synergistic interplay of these factors combined, rather than just genes or just environment, appears to account for black/white divergence in a gamut of social behaviors.
ISBN: 9781633886018Publication Date: 2020
Troublesome Science by
Rob DeSalle and Ian Tattersall explain how science has been misused to sustain belief in the biological basis of racial classification. Troublesome Science draws on the tools of taxonomy to show that while the diversity that exists within our species is a real phenomenon, it nevertheless defeats any attempt to recognize discrete units within it.
ISBN: 9780231546300Publication Date: 2018
Organizations
Below are a selection of organizations to support students, researchers, and faculty in STEM as well as groups dedicated to social justice and anti-racist efforts. This is not a comprehensive list and many more organizations exist.
- ASPIRE: The National Alliance for Inclusive and Diverse STEM Faculty Aspire seeks to develop inclusive and diverse STEM faculty across the nation by aligning and reinforcing professional development, hiring, and retention practices of STEM faculty simultaneously at institutional, regional, and national levels.
- Latinas in STEM The Latinas in STEM Foundation was founded in the summer of 2013 by Latina MIT alumnae who were interested in formalizing the work they were already doing in their respective communities. The founders of Latinas in STEM are first generation American women who were the first in their families to attend college. This group of Latinas know first-hand the many barriers to entry for women in STEM fields. Those barriers are compounded for Latinas due to a lack of role models, lagging outreach, and overall limited parental awareness. Latinas in STEM is a volunteer led and run organization. Members are all employed full-time in industry and pursue this work across the country to fulfill their desire to give back to their community. Latinas in STEM is a force from the community for the community. They are graduates and professionals with STEM careers in industry and a long track record of community service. Their primary purpose is to spread awareness of STEM and to inspire and empower Latina students in the primary and secondary grades, especially in underserved communities, to pursue a STEM career. Latinas in STEM educate parents, as well as students, so that they may be better positioned to support their daughters along their educational journey. Latinas in STEM also help Latinas currently pursuing careers in STEM to thrive in college and in their professional careers. Latinas in STEM has created an ever growing network of Latinas working in STEM fields that empower each other to thrive in their careers through mentorship, networking, and recognition.
- oSTEM: Out in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics oSTEM empowers LGBTQ+ people in STEM to succeed personally, academically, and professionally by cultivating environments and communities that nurture innovation, leadership, and advocacy.
- SACNAS: Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics & Native Americans in Science SACNAS is an inclusive organization dedicated to fostering the success of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans, from college students to professionals, in attaining advanced degrees, careers, and positions of leadership in STEM.
- SSWOC: Society of STEM Women of Color SSWOC is dedicated to enabling Women of Color to fully pursue careers in STEM. Our mission is to achieve professional liberation, the freedom to pursue one’s professional goals to the extent of one’s own aptitude without externally imposed limitations, for all women, particularly those from historically underrepresented populations.
- Women of Color Research Network The Women of Color Research Network was created to provide women of color and supporters of their advancement in the biomedical sciences information about the NIH grants process, advice on career development, and a venue or forum for networking and sharing information.
Institutes and Organizations at Northeastern
For other groups and support at Northeastern, please click here to view the Support page on our Anti-Racism Guide.
- Center for Inclusive ComputingA nonprofit housed at Northeastern University, the Center helps improve representation in the computing profession and to make it more welcoming to women and historically underrepresented groups.
- Institute of Health, Equity, and Social Justice (IHESJR) Disparities in health and mental health arise and persist as the result of complex individual, societal, and global factors. Research teams at IHESJR draw upon a wide range of research methods and interventions, sharing a commitment to promoting health equity and social justice through high-impact, community engaged research.
Northeastern Resource and Cultural Centers:
Student Groups and Organizations:
Take Action
Reading, listening, and supporting the STEM-related organizations and initiatives included on this page are a great start.
Want to do more? Check out our page on taking action for other ways you can fight racism, including voting, volunteering, keeping up with the conversation, attending campus events, plus training and organizations beyond STEM that you can get involved with.
Need Help?
If you're looking for more resources or for something different, please reach out to one of our STEM Librarians:
- Jodi Bolognese (j.bolognese@northeastern.edu): Engineering
- Philip Espinola Coombs (p.coombs@northeastern.edu): Health Sciences, Nursing, Nutrition, Speech Pathology & Audiology, Communication Sciences and Disorders
- Lauri Fennell (l.fennell@northeastern.edu): Health Sciences, Health Informatics, Physical Therapy, Public Health, Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences
- Alyn Gamble (aly.gamble@northeastern.edu): Biology, Biochemistry, Biotechnology, Bioinformatics, Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Marine and Environmental Science, and Mathematics
- Kathy Herrlich (k.herrlich@northeastern.edu): Psychology, Behavioral Neuroscience, Linguistics, Physics, Regulatory Affairs in Drugs, Biologics, and Medical Devices
- Rachel Landis (r.landis@northeastern.edu): Computer Science