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Books: African American Women Chemists
Dec. 30th, 2014 10:21 amAfrican American Women Chemists, by Jeanette Brown, was just the right book for me to be reading last month. The text includes a short introduction, a series of very short biographies of African American women chemists (typically 2-3 pages), and then a short biography of the author (I believe autobiography, but written in 3rd person). Time-wise, the profiles include scientists who were working or teaching in the 1800s all the way to those still working now. Some of the chemists worked primarily as teachers, some as researchers and teachers in educational institutions, and others primarily as researchers in government laboratories or private laboratories.
Each individual biography is fairly short and the text does not make analytical comments comparing the biographies, but it was an absolutely fascinating read and offered a lot of opportunities for analysis. There were definitely patterns in common throughout the biographies.
The biggest takeaway for me was a better picture, in aggregate, of the barriers the scientists faced in pursuing their careers and the factors that supported them. The importance of historically black colleges and universities (especially given the continuing racism of hiring offices and faculty/researchers and many labs in predominantly white institutions) really came home to me after seeing how many of the scientists studied at historically black colleges and universities or were offered their first teaching jobs there (often both). After hearing about the settlements USDA has made with black farmers in the last few years, the fact that there were racially segregated research grants on less favorable terms to black scientists should not have been a surprise to me, but it was - even after overcoming racist barriers (explicit and structural) to get their degrees and find homes for their research, many of the scientists profiled also had to do their research with shorter-term grants, smaller dollar amounts, less equipment, and less time to wrap up projects and work at the end of the research terms because their funding had come from the government under grant terms that funded black researchers from a separate funding pool with more restrictions.
The profile of Alice Ball was especially heartbreaking for me, and now I really want some kind of fix-it steampunk science fiction story where she lives to a ripe old age doing ground breaking science all the time and gets to travel on an airship doing science and being awesome forever, because go Alice Ball.
Jeannette Brown, the author, also seems to be pretty awesome. (Here's a blog post by her: http://blog.oup.com/2014/03/minority-women-chemists-yesterday-and-today/)
Each individual biography is fairly short and the text does not make analytical comments comparing the biographies, but it was an absolutely fascinating read and offered a lot of opportunities for analysis. There were definitely patterns in common throughout the biographies.
The biggest takeaway for me was a better picture, in aggregate, of the barriers the scientists faced in pursuing their careers and the factors that supported them. The importance of historically black colleges and universities (especially given the continuing racism of hiring offices and faculty/researchers and many labs in predominantly white institutions) really came home to me after seeing how many of the scientists studied at historically black colleges and universities or were offered their first teaching jobs there (often both). After hearing about the settlements USDA has made with black farmers in the last few years, the fact that there were racially segregated research grants on less favorable terms to black scientists should not have been a surprise to me, but it was - even after overcoming racist barriers (explicit and structural) to get their degrees and find homes for their research, many of the scientists profiled also had to do their research with shorter-term grants, smaller dollar amounts, less equipment, and less time to wrap up projects and work at the end of the research terms because their funding had come from the government under grant terms that funded black researchers from a separate funding pool with more restrictions.
The profile of Alice Ball was especially heartbreaking for me, and now I really want some kind of fix-it steampunk science fiction story where she lives to a ripe old age doing ground breaking science all the time and gets to travel on an airship doing science and being awesome forever, because go Alice Ball.
Jeannette Brown, the author, also seems to be pretty awesome. (Here's a blog post by her: http://blog.oup.com/2014/03/minority-women-chemists-yesterday-and-today/)
