Sunday, August 2, 2020
By:
On the second week of this internship, I gave my account of AIP’s Strike for Black Lives, popularly known as #ShutDownSTEM. The TLDR: physics culture– like every aspect of our society– has roots in systemic racism that we all need to work together to upend. #ShutDownSTEM was the first step of a movement towards making physics an anti-racist field. It seems appropriate that, on this second-to-last week, I come full circle and revisit the topic.
Since #ShutDownSTEM back in June, the Physics Today staff have hosted meetings and created a list of concrete action items in order to strengthen black voices in the magazine. The online editorial published a brilliant, sobering commentary titled Disentangling anti-Blackness from physics.
Meanwhile, throughout the course of the internship, I’ve been scrambling to concoct a longer article for the online edition. Such an article would need to cover a topic in greater depth than the research updates that I’ve been writing. As I searched for inspiration, I recalled #ShutDownSTEM. During the strike, I came across a powerful panel on black feminism led by LGBTQ+ women of color. The panelists talked about the importance of investigating intersectionality: the overlap of multiple social identities. I began to think about intersectionality in physics culture, and thus an idea was born.
As a physicist, a woman, and a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I can speak to a certain experience of intersectionality. I can speak to the pressure that women often feel to present more masculine in order to be taken seriously. I can speak to the pervasive silence surrounding LGBTQ+ issues and the fact that, in my four years as an undergraduate (in Asheville, of all places), I was never out within my department. But the more research I’ve done, the more I want my article to focus on women of color. The more my article focuses on women of color, the less relevant my own experience becomes, and the more I must rely on the experiences of others.
This week, I interviewed a very inspiring physicist whose words will be the driving force of my article. As she spoke, I realized how little I understand about what it means to be a black woman in physics. I realized that my job isn’t to speak for these women; it’s to use my position as a writer to broadcast their voices. This piece will be difficult to write, and it will almost certainly extend beyond the end of the internship. I anticipate that it will be a powerful process of confronting my privilege, making a million mistakes, and learning from the feedback that I receive. I have miles left to go, but I know myself, and I’m confident that I will never be complacent.
Samantha Creech