American Grant Writing: Race Matters

PHPNerd writes "You might expect that science, particularly American science, would be color-blind. Though fewer people from some of the country's ethnic minorities are scientists than the proportions of those minorities in the population suggest should be the case, once someone has got bench space in a laboratory, he might reasonably expect to be treated on merit and nothing else. Unfortunately, a study just published in Science suggests that is not true. The study looked at the pattern of research grants awarded by the NIH and found that race matters a lot. Moreover, Asian and Hispanic scientists do just as well as white ones. Black scientists, however, fare badly."

Re:Bias against other professionals, too.

[nomadic]

Scientific equipment doesn't mean you're doing science. If I used a scanning electron microscope to find angels dancing on the head of a pin that doesn't mean I'm conducting science.

Re:Affirmative Action

[SpeZek]

Affirmative Action doesn't hand the student a degree, it just gets them in the school. Just because someone was born into a shitty situation doesn't mean they shouldn't get the same opportunities as the upper class who never have to worry about discrimination.

Re:Why have any racial indicators?

[David Greene]

That's exactly right. This is structural racialization. Past history of discrimination constructed a structure that now disadvantages minorities and often blacks in particular. In fact everything about the process may be perfectly colorblind but the fact that structures of relationship, reputation, etc. exist and were built during times of overt discrimination means that outcomes today will be inequitable.

This is why a "colorblind" society doesn't exist. Being "colorblind" simply means we will maintain the status quo and inequity will continue. This is why we need to explicitly address and take race into account when making decisions around policy, opportunity and process. We need to explicitly address racial inequity in order to become an equitable society.

Re:Why have any racial indicators?

[Larryish]

Even if ethnicity is removed, name can indicate ethnicity.

Example: David Johnson
                              Jerome Abdullah
                              Kim Wilfong

David? Probably white.
Jerome? Probably black.
Kim? Possibly Asian.