“You are too smart to be Mexican” and “Congratulations! You probably got the award because you are Latino” are two of many remarks we, as scholars and professionals, heard at some of the top academic centers in the country.
In the very same places we learned the skills of our professions, we were also frequently reminded that we were minorities in biomedical research. While being a minority is a constant and inescapable identity, it is not our only identity. We would rather be known for our hard-earned contributions to research and biomedicine.
One of us is a professor and neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins University (soon to be the Chair of Neurologic Surgery at the Mayo Clinic), the other is a professor and a basic research scientist at Yale University. We both study the brain —that mysterious organ that enables us to create new ideas, to hold tight to old prejudices and to judge between right and wrong.
Even for us, it doesn’t seem to matter how many lives we’ve saved in the operating room or how many scientific discoveries we’ve made, to some we will always be stereotypes: “illegals”, “anchor babies” and “rapists.” Being a minority in this country means inheriting a narrative of prejudice, regardless of personal accomplishments.
It’s particularly hard to see this narrative perpetuated onto young scientists. In our positions of leadership, we are in charge of educating the next generation of biomedical researchers and doctors of all backgrounds, religions and ideologies.
Our minority trainees are exhausted. Training in biomedical research is taxing, but that is not what tires them. They are drained by the constant bombardment of narratives and stereotypes that compromise their ability to focus on their training. The prejudice is crushing their creativity and stifling their innovation. It is suffocating a generation of biomedical researchers.
In the biomedical sciences women earn more than half of Ph.Ds. but represent just 33 percent of newly hired tenured and tenure-track professors. Minority scientists earn 10 percent of life science Ph.Ds. but represent only 2 percent of medical school basic science tenure/tenure-track faculty —a number unchanged since 1980.
This summer we are both teaching at the Marine Biological Laboratory, an elite research center and summer intellectual retreat in Massachusetts. The center welcomes outstanding scientists and students from the world to spend four intense weeks teaching and learning.
Recently, a teaching assistant approached an African-American student, asked for the student’s home address and said he planned to burn a cross in front of the student’s house.
The T.A. was promptly expelled, and the community was informed of the event. The institution dealt with the event with assertive leadership, transparency and fairness that is lacking in many other institutions in which we have worked.
But expelling an individual is not sufficient. The most dangerous aspect of prejudice is not its presence in an individual, but its pervasiveness as an ideology.
As scientists, we aspire to have a diverse biomedical workforce where people are judged by their ideas and contributions, regardless of their background. But conversations about why we lack diversity are frequently left to minority researchers. For others, these conversations are often uncomfortable, distracting, irrelevant, or a “waste of time.” Our academic centers offer few spaces where all participants of the biomedical workforce can have frank discussions about race and an ongoing legacy of racism in our institutions.
We all need to acknowledge racism and its heavy-handed presence in our communities. We must realize that such conversations do not belong just to minority scientists. We should understand that our biomedical workforce, and our society, suffers if we do not engage in these conversations, and that in our silence, we are complicit in the problem.
Expulsion, while a solution for a summer course, is not a solution for a systemic problem in our society and institutions of higher learning. Regular conversations, spearheaded by the academic leadership but engaging all of the biomedical community are necessary as a launching point to identify evidence-driven solutions that mitigate the multigenerational impacts of racism on biomedical science.
Daniel A. Colón-Ramos is an associate professor in cell biology and neuroscience at the Yale School of Medicine. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa is a professor in neurological surgery and oncology at Johns Hopkins University.