For a Day, Scientists Pause Science to Confront Racism

The event was organized by a loosely affiliated group of physicists and cosmologists operating under various hashtags, including #Strike4BlackLives, #ShutDownStem and #ShutDownAcademia.

Participants planned to cancel classes, lectures or committee meetings, hold off on reporting any breakthroughs, and forgo engaging with email and reading draft articles for peer review. Instead, they would devote the day to a close examination of how science does business.

“Racism in science is enmeshed with the larger scheme of white supremacy in society,” said Brian Nord, a physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois and one of the organizers of the strike, repeating a phrase he attributed to his co-organizer, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a cosmologist at the University of New Hampshire. “We need to rethink what scientific collaborations should look like. Black people need a seat at the table.”

He added, “The idea is to disrupt the system, at least for a day.” As of Wednesday morning, some 5,700 scientists had signed a pledge to strike, and registration was closed. The petition reads, in part: “We recognize that our academic institutions and research collaborations — despite big talk about diversity, equity and inclusion — have ultimately failed black people.”

Demands for justice have been met with gradualism and tokenism, the organizers said, and black students still often feel unsupported and unwelcome at predominantly white college campuses and laboratories.

Many leading scientific journals, including Science, Physical Review Letters and arXiv, an online platform where physicists post their pre-prints, have all said that they will be silent on Wednesday.

In a notice sent to reporters on Tuesday, the prominent journal Nature, which publishes new research papers every Wednesday, said that it would hold off on doing so until Thursday, with the exception of breaking news about the coronavirus.

“Naturecondemns police prejudice and violence, we stand against all forms of racism, and we join others around the world in saying, unequivocally, Black Lives Matter,” their statement read. “We recognize that Natureis one of the white institutions that is responsible for bias in research and scholarship. The enterprise of science has been — and remains — complicit in systemic racism, and it must strive harder to correct those injustices and amplify marginalized voices.”