How else to understand this?:
Racial and ethnic discrimination persist in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields, including ecology, evolution and conservation biology (EECB) and related disciplines. Marginalization and oppression as a result of institutional and structural racism continue to create barriers to inclusion for Black people, Indigenous people and people of colour (BIPOC), and remnants of historic racist policies and pseudoscientific theories continue to plague these fields. Many academic EECB departments seek concrete ways to improve the climate and implement anti-racist policies in their teaching, training and research activities. We present a toolkit of evidence-based interventions for academic EECB departments to foster anti-racism in three areas: in the classroom; within research laboratories; and department wide. To spark restorative discussion and action in these areas, we summarize EECB’s racist and ethnocentric histories, as well as current systemic problems that marginalize non-white groups. Finally, we present ways that EECB departments can collectively address shortcomings in equity and inclusion by implementing anti-racism, and provide a positive model for other departments and disciplines….
Cronin, M.R., Alonzo, S.H., Adamczak, S.K. et al. Anti-racist interventions to transform ecology, evolution and conservation biology departments. Nat Ecol Evol (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01522-z
This is a license to harm Asians without necessarily helping anyone else because they are “overrepresented” in STEM. Any useful intervention would start with why more BIPOC students don’t consider STEM. In any such situation, more factors are at work than external prejudice.
Bur now, how sad that an intervention likely to do little more than entrench social conflict is the one that contains these words:
“The discipline of evolutionary biology has also been used at times to advance racist ideology. In fact, the writings of Charles Darwin, who is widely considered the father of evolutionary thought, contained racist ideas, including the belief that white Europeans were evolutionarily more advanced than the so-called savage races they colonized. Beginning in the late 1800s, the theory of natural selection was also misinterpreted in some intellectual circles to advance eugenics and social Darwinism, as well as to make apocryphal claims about race and gender. Since its publication, evolutionary theory has been distorted to fuel false claims of scientific racism in modern social and scientific literature, despite widespread and explicit scientific consensus to refute these ideas”
Yes, quite. And actually, Darwinism’s impact on racial minorities has been far worse than that:
This (above) is YouTube’s response to Biology of the Second Reich, John West’s documentary on the Second Reich’s genocide in Africa. If you go directly to YouTube, you can still see the film. The accuracy is not seriously disputed.
Look, we have been banging on about this for decades. And it has been a point of principle to ignore, ridicule, and misrepresent us, even though — by any reasonable standard — we are correct on the subject.
But when people won’t listen to reason, they may end up being forced to listen to unreason, which helps no one.
The paper is closed access.
See also: Darwinian biologist Jerry Coyne speaks out on a SciAm op-ed’s claims that denial of evolution stems from white supremacy. It seems obvious, on reflection, that Hopper’s piece is a disastrously clumsy effort on the part of Scientific American to get Woke. Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne thinks the mag is not just circling the drain but “approaching the drainhole.” To the extent that the editors couldn’t find someone who at least gets basic facts right, he has a point.
Historian Richard Weikart on acceptance of Darwinian evolution and racism …
Richard Weikart: I have done a good deal of research on this topic, and as it turns out, the vast majority of white supremacists today embrace Darwinian evolution and use it as evidence for their white supremacy.