African American Science Research Articles

Validating the Engineering Fields Questionnaire for Use With African American Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Students

Lent’s (2003) Engineering Fields Questionnaire assesses major components of Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) and includes measures of self-efficacy, coping efficacy, outcome expectations, technical interests, and educational goals. These measures have demonstrated good internal consistency in previous research, but validation information is more limited for use with African American STEM students. This paper discusses a validation study of an adapted version of Lent’s Engineering Fields Questionnaire, entitled the STEM Fields Questionnaire, with a sample of African American undergraduate STEM students ( n = 526). Validating the STEM Fields Questionnaire for African Americans is particularly important given the role of cultural values and certain experiences in career development among this population. Seven factors resulted from an exploratory factor analysis conducted in the present study: engineering/technology interests, outcome expectations, self-efficacy, STEM coping, goals, bio-chemical sciences interest/self-efficacy, and mathematics interest/self-efficacy, with four of six original subscales represented. Implications for research and practice were discussed.

Illuminating the Contributions of African American Nurse Scientists Despite Structural Racism Barriers: A Qualitative Descriptive Study.

Illuminating the Contributions of African American Nurse Scientists Despite Structural Racism Barriers: A Qualitative Descriptive Study.

Illuminating the Contributions of African American Nurse Scientists Despite Structural Racism Barriers: A Qualitative Descriptive Study.

A qualitative descriptive approach examined African American nurse scientists' (AANSs') experiences with African American research participants despite obstacles of structural racism. Fourteen nurse scientists participated in semistructured interviews that provided data for the thematic analysis. Major themes included barriers to overcome as doctoral students, cultural experiences with structural racism, designers of culturally sensitive research, and humanitarian respect and relationship depth. This is the first research study to illuminate the contributions of AANSs who lead research in health disparities. Therefore, nursing leadership needs to illuminate AANSs' contributions, increase nurse diversification, and dismantle structural racism that creates obstacles that ultimately impact population health.

The Black Scientific Renaissance of the 1970s–90s: The Legacy of African American Scientists at Bell Laboratories

The Black Scientific Renaissance of the 1970s–90s: The Legacy of African American Scientists at Bell Laboratories

Perceived Barriers to Serving on National Institutes of Health Scientific Review Groups Experienced by Black and African American Scientists

African American and Black scientists are awarded disproportionately fewer National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants than White scientists. Increasing Black representation on NIH scientific review groups (SRGs) likely will contribute to increased equity in funding rates because research topics of Black and African American scientists' submitted applications will be more highly valued; however, Black and African American scientists often perceive barriers that prevent them from serving on NIH SRGs. To examine perceived barriers that prevent Black and African American scientists from serving on NIH SRGs. This qualitative study used a mixed methods online approach with a convenience sample of Black and African American scientists to identify barriers to NIH grant review participation. Eligible participants were recruited online from professional organizations with primarily Black and African American membership. From February through April 2021, participants were asked to identify barriers to serving on NIH SRGs using concept mapping. Participants brainstormed statements describing barriers to serving on NIH SRGs, sorted statements into content themes, and rated statements on how true they were. Multidimensional scaling and a hierarchical cluster analysis identified content themes. Data analysis was conducted in May and June of 2021. Self-reported barriers to serving on an NIH SRG among Black and African American scientists. A total of 52 scientists participated in both phases of the study (mean [SD] age, 42.3 [8.2] years; 46 women [88.5%]). Participants provided 68 unique statements that were organized into 9 thematic clusters describing barriers to serving on NIH SRGs. Themes included structural racism, diversity not valued, toxic environment, review workload demand, lack of reward, negative affect about the review process, competing demands at home institution, lack of opportunity, and perceptions of being unqualified. Black and African American scientists reported many barriers to serving on NIH SRGs that are unique to Black and African American scientists, as well as barriers that transcend race but are exacerbated by structural racism. This study provides NIH with concrete opportunities to address realized barriers to increase inclusion of Black and African American scientists on NIH SRGs, fund more Black and African American scientists, and ultimately reduce health inequities in the US.

Reversing the Middle Passage: The Afrofuturist Aesthetic of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

Reversing the Middle Passage: The Afrofuturist Aesthetic of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon Ousseynou B. Traore (bio) Before looking at Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and how it reflects Afrofuturism, it may be helpful first to define that concept itself. According to Alex Zamalin, “[Afrofuturism] has long been associated with science fiction and technology in the future, replete with robots and supercomputers” (10). While there are no robots and supercomputers in Song of Solomon, there is plenty about the past, the future, and their complex back-and-forth interactions. Ytasha L. Womack offers the following: Whether through literature, visual arts, music, or grassroots organizing, Afrofuturism redefines culture and notions of blackness for today and the future. Both an artistic aesthetic and a framework of critical theory, Afrofuturism combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western beliefs. In some cases, it’s a total re-envisioning of the past and speculation about the future rife with cultural critiques. (9, my emphasis) Womack’s definition has the advantage of being deeply rooted in debates and theories that demarcate the recognizably Afrocentric orientation and also the African and African Diaspora myths, beliefs systems, and traditions of spirituality and magic that inform the aesthetic of Song of Solomon. On the other hand, science fiction and technology, as generally understood, admittedly do not play much of a role in the novel. However, in his essay “Black to the Future,” African-American science fiction writer Walter Mosley states: that “Any book that offers an alternative account for the way things are catches my attention. . . . This is because I believe that the world we live in is so much larger, has so many more possibilities, than our simple sciences describe” (405). Mosley is critical of the limitations of what he calls “our simple sciences”—perhaps meaning Western or Eurocentric ones—and instead promotes an “alternative account,” science fiction, for the way that things in a global world are “so much larger” than the Eurocentric West. Mosley then goes on to list a few major voices in the mainstream of black speculative and science fiction, such as Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delaney, Steven Barnes, and concludes: “There are also flashes of the genre in such respected writers as Toni Morrison and Derrick Bell” (406). Womack and Mosley thus confirm and complement each other’s critical thought and open the way for a variety of reflections. Building on the foundation provided by these two critics, I propose to examine what Mosley calls “flashes of [End Page 122] the genre” in Morrison’s Song of Solomon, which I would describe as exemplifying an “Afromythic” literary mode within the global theory of Afrofuturism. In Song of Solomon, Pilate is the ancestor. For Morrison, “the concept of the ancestor is not necessarily as a parent but as an abiding, interested, benevolent, guiding presence that is yours and is concerned about you” (Davis 227). Pilate embodies a huge library of West and West-Central African cultures that reflect on the past, the present, and the future; she arrives in Michigan with a green tarpaulin bag containing the skeletal remains of her murdered father and refers to it as her “inheritance” (97; 163–64). But Pilate is also the central bearer of the concept of Afrofuturism in Song of Solomon as she becomes its principal activating force that governs Mr. Smith’s flight at the beginning of the novel as well as Milkman’s soaring jump on Solomon’s Leap at the end. Her fantastic “self-birth” and lack of a navel mark her as one not born of a human being but self-created or created by forces beyond human knowledge. Nevertheless, Afrofuturism as a speculative process in this novel does not involve what is usually described as science fiction and does not depend on Western technology or science. Rather, it is activated by creative African knowledge and memory systems, especially the myth of “Flying Africans” who flew back to Africa as a form of resistance to slavery and a way of reversing the Middle Passage and its aftermath. Two philosophical expressions or models from the African experience come to mind. One...

A 'Dubious Expediency': How Race-Preferential Admissions Policies on Campus Hurt Minority Students

Mounting empirical research shows that race-preferential admissions policies are doing more harm than good. Instead of increasing the numbers of African Americans entering high-status careers, these policies reduce those numbers relative to what we would have had if colleges and universities had followed race-neutral policies. We have fewer African-American scientists, physicians, and engineers and likely fewer lawyers and college professors. If, as the evidence indicates, the effects of race-preferential admissions policies are exactly the opposite of what was originally intended, it is difficult to understand why anyone would wish to support them.

Recruitment process that attracts underrepresented students in graduate science and medical education programs

ABSTRACT While the population of minorities is increasing in the USA, the numbers obtaining advanced degrees in science/engineering and medicine are minimal. Underrepresented groups make up 19% of the USA labor pool, but less than 6% of science (engineering and medicine) Ph.D.’s. Diversifying the universities and health-care institutions is important to improve the academic experience of faculty, staff, students and everyone regardless of race. To prepare for the approaching diverse environments, educational institutions must create programs that allow underrepresented groups thrive in higher education; and logistically to be sustaining, the recruitment programs must begin at the student level. One approach is the integration of the history (the linking of past-heroes with present-heroes) of science; which is an interesting and important paradigm that can be implemented. As such, a day-long symposium highlighting the life and accomplishments of an African American Scientist; Dr. Ernest Everett Just, Ph.D., is used as a working model to inspire, educate on admission requirements, and to recruit into graduate science and medical programs.

The Strong Binti in Nnedi Okorafor’s African American Science Fiction

By looking carefully at the history of science fiction, we can notice that African American authors have been excluded from the scene for a long time due to the “whiteness” of the genre in terms of writing and publication. In addition to racism, sexism persists in the science fiction community. Hence, marginalized black women writers of science fiction try to include more black women characters in their literary works. Through Binti, Binti: Home, and Binti: The Night Masquerade, Nnedi Okorafor focuses on the experience of being black and woman in a technological society of the future. This study discusses how Okorafor provides sharp comments on the lives of black women in America in terms of “race” and “gender.” She challenges the stereotypical image of the black woman as “other” through the subversion of white norms and traditions. In this analysis, we use “Afrofuturism” and “black feminism” as a theoretical framework since “Afrofuturism” tackles African American issues related to twentieth-century technoculture, and “black feminism” deals with black women empowerment. The major character, Binti, proves that she deserves to reach a higher position as an empowered girl of the future, which gives her self-confidence to be autonomous and to have control over her own life.

Poetry and digital media for improving upper elementary African American science learning

ABSTRACT This study aims to analyze a case study of the Digi-Stars Science Film Club, which focused on using poetry, and digital media to improve upper elementary African Americans’ science learning. Fourth and sixth grade students enrolled in an urban, parochial school took part in the club. Performance fluency skills of the students were measured before and after teaching sessions of digital storytelling, filmmaking, and guided, expressive reading of science plays, poems, songs, and raps. The results indicated that the creation of poetry with digital media projects improved students’ writing quality for ideas, organization, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions. The digital storytelling improved the use of story elements and science vocabulary. Students’ digital stories demonstrated a steady progress in the elements of digital storytelling, media competency, and agency of students. Opportunities and challenges of implementing culturally responsive science pedagogy are discussed.

Charles H. Turner, pioneer in animal cognition.

An African American scientist's early discoveries are forgotten for all the wrong reasons

Profile of Paul E. Turner

“There is a lot of power in addressing general questions in biology using the smallest inhabitants of the planet,” says Paul E. Turner, the Rachel Carson Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University. Conducting interdisciplinary and experimental evolution studies of microbes, Turner and his colleagues elucidate virus evolution and ecology and host–parasite interactions, among other subjects. Turner, who was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2019, also conducts applied research on the development of virus-based therapies that hold promise for combating antibiotic-resistant bacterial pathogens. His Inaugural Article (1) contributes to that body of research, which is helping to launch a new era in phage biotechnology. Paul E. Turner. Image credit: Michael Marsland (Yale University, New Haven, CT). When Turner reflects on his childhood, spent in the San Francisco Bay Area and central New York, fond memories concerning biology come to his mind: Exploring forests, visiting zoos, reading books by Stephen Jay Gould, and watching television programs like Wild Kingdom . Alice Kendrick, a teacher at Jamesville-DeWitt High School in New York, cultivated his interest in biology. “She is awesome and made a lasting positive impact,” Turner says. His parents were both college-educated and employed in professions related to theology and education. Turner says, “Although they were not scientists, my parents appreciated that I was captivated with biology and they provided supportive encouragement for me to pursue a career in this discipline.” After earning a bachelor of arts degree in biological sciences from the University of Rochester in 1988, Turner began graduate studies at the University of California, Irvine. There he met evolutionary biologist Joseph Graves, Jr, then a postdoctoral fellow. Turner says, “This prominent African American scientist served as my early life coach, helping me to navigate a field where diversity remains very low.” Turner transferred …

Expanding the Science Capital in K–12 Science Textbooks: A Notable Doctor's Insights into Biology & Other Accomplishments of African American Scientists

This article explores the need to include the science capital and cultural capital of African Americans in science teaching and offers practical exemplars for inclusion in the K–12 science curriculum. The author discusses ideas in the evolution of culture that contribute to the science content and perspectives of current textbooks and their supporting educative curriculum materials. The exemplars provided shed light on the scientific concepts and ideas indicated by the scientific accomplishments and narratives of African American scientists and a notable doctor, Charles R. Drew. The practical considerations described have implications for the disciplinary core ideas in the Next Generation Science Standards, and for understanding the cultural, social, and political values inherent in the nature of science.

“Any place is better than here”: Afro-Zionism in the Science Fiction of Ray Bradbury and Derrick Bell

CLA JOURNAL 25 “Any place is better than here”: Afro-Zionism in the Science Fiction of Ray Bradbury and Derrick Bell Trent Masiki The Field Negro’s Lament In his 1963 speech “Message to the Grassroots,” Malcolm X tells a parable about the house Negro and the field Negro, two male slaves who hold opposing views on the merits of escaping their life in racial bondage. Paralyzed by the creature comforts of his relative privilege, the house Negro is satisfied with the status quo. When approached with the idea of running away, the house Negro balks, “Man, you crazy. What you mean, separate? Where is there a better house than this? Where can I wear better clothes than this? Where can I eat better food than this?” Fearing neither uncertainty nor the unknown, the field Negro replies, “Any place is better than here” (Malcolm X 11).The field Negro’s lament epitomizes how African Americans have, from the nineteenth century to the present, theorized and practiced emigration as a response to US racism and racial terror. Because they demonstrated the capacity to imagine and effect a liberated future for themselves, fugitive-minded slaves like the allegorical field Negro were, loosely speaking, afrofuturists. In his 1993 article “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose,” Mark Dery coined the term afrofuturism,1 defining it as an aesthetic mode of expression that focuses on African Americans and their relationship to advanced science and technology in the near or distant future (Dery 180). Since the 1990s, afrofuturism gained a host of proponents in literary and cultural studies because it advances the idea that African American speculative culture should promote African American social, political, and cultural agency. Scholars and writers like Alondra Nelson, Sheree R. Thomas, Nalo Hopkinson, Reynaldo Anderson, Kodwo Eshun, and Jeffery Allen Tucker were key in promoting the critical study of speculative literature by writers of African descent and defining afrofuturism as a Pan-African aesthetic rather than an exclusively African American one.2 Although afrofuturism is ethnocentric in its content, it is racially ecumenical in its authorship. Just as anyone can sing the blues, play 1 “Black to the Future” was first published in South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 92, no. 4, 1993. For a twenty-five year scholarly retrospective on afrofuturism, see Barber et al. 2 Each of these scholars and writers has written seminal texts about afrofuturism and African American science fiction, see Nelson; Thomas; Hopkinson and Nelson; Anderson and Jones; Anderson; Eshun; Tucker. 26 CLA JOURNAL Trent Masiki jazz, or perform hip hop dance, Dery suggests that anyone, regardless of race, can produce an afrofuturist text.3 Afrofuturism’s ethnoracial pluralism is essential to its efficacy as an antiracist cultural technology, argues literary scholar DeWitt D. Kilgore. Afrofuturism, contends Kilgore, “can be viewed as less a marker of black authenticity and more of a cultural force, an episteme that betokens a shift in our largely unconscious assumptions about which histories matter and how they may serve as a precondition for any future we might imagine” (“Afrofuturism” 564). On one hand, afrofuturism’s racial pluralism poses the threat that speculative literature and media about people of African descent will be produced by people who have no existential investment in the history and condition of being a person of African descent. On the other hand, afrofuturism’s pluralism encourages all people, regardless of their race, to consume speculative literature, film, music, and art that centers and/or features people of African descent.4 The rich tension between afrofuturism’s ethnocentrism and its racial pluralism invites one to analyze understudied racial themes in Ray Bradbury’s “Way in the Middle of the Air” (1950) and Derrick A. Bell’s “The Space Traders” (1992). Since 2003, scholars in African American literary studies have been reinvestigating “Way in the Middle of the Air” and “The Space Traders” because these stories directly address science fiction’s evasion of the history of slavery, segregation, and racial terror in the US. In his book Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction, André M. Carrington notes that Bradbury is a significant science fiction writer because he explicitly engages racial...

Challenging stereotypes: A glimpse into nursing's difficulty recruiting African Americans.

A racially diverse registered nurse workforce could improve health outcomes for minority populations, and efforts to recruit students from underrepresented groups need to be strengthened. To explore the perceptions of nursing held by African American undergraduate non-nursing science majors within the context of their career ideals. Qualitative description was the research design utilized in this study. A purposive sample of 20 African American non-nursing science majors participated in semi-structured interviews. Miles, Huberman, and Saldaña's (2014) coding processes for qualitative analysis were employed. Three themes were identified that described career behavior, ideals, and the participants' perceptions of nursing as a career: 1.) Career Development: Internal and External Contributions, 2.) The Ideal Career: Profession with Power, and 3.) Perception of Nursing: A Limited Profession. Findings suggest African American science majors carry a significant burden to overcome stereotypes for themselves and their communities, thus desire careers with power and autonomy. Careers in medicine were idealized whereas careers in nursing were devalued. These college students often embraced careers in medicine due to, in part, the perceived ability to overcome stereotypes and simultaneously rejected nursing careers due to desire to avoid negatively stereotyped careers.

Martin R. Delany’s Speculative Fiction and the Nineteenth-Century Economy of Slave Conspiracy

Martin R. Delany’s Speculative Fiction and the Nineteenth-Century Economy of Slave Conspiracy Jennifer C. Brittan (bio) It has become commonplace for histories of African American science fiction to cite Martin R. Delany’s antebellum novel Blake; or, The Huts of America: A Tale of the Mississippi Valley, the Southern United States, and Cuba as this tradition’s point of origin.1 For Britt Rusert, Delany’s interest in the microscope and the novel’s attention to astronomy create “rich imaginative terrain for speculations on freedom and world making.”2 Identifying this first American novel of black uprising as speculative fiction requires only basic familiarity with the title character and plot.3 Freeborn in Cuba but captured into slavery, Blake travels from Mississippi to Havana to lead the slave South in a conspiracy on the scale of the hemisphere. Just this bare outline establishes Blake as resolutely fictional. To begin, we might wonder how Delany, an outspoken critic of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, approached the creation of his rebel slave. Blake was this prolific writer’s only work of fiction, and readers have tended to identify Delany’s intention and attitude as functionalist. Most recently, Jerome McGann describes Delany as having “a focused purpose” in writing Blake, namely, “to bring about actual social change.”4 This view obscures the importance of fiction as a central focus of the novel. Looking to Delany’s interest in fiction as both subject matter and strategy clarifies how the realist novel and the work of speculative fiction overlap. For decades, critical interest in Blake focused on its realism, paying particular attention to the way the novel maps the transnational economics of slavery. Making the commercial world of the United States visible meant substituting a discrete national body for a diffuse geography stretching across the plantation South. What results, in Blake, is an anamorphic nation that comes into focus from the vantage point of Cuba, where Southern [End Page 79] and Northern interests intersect. One of the jobs of the realist novel is to make existing social worlds legible, and with Blake, published serially between 1859 and 1862, Delany shows a documentary concern for recording his own unfolding moment, tracing the close ties between antebellum expansionism, the illegal international slave trade, and the U.S. economy at large.5 As McGann puts it, “No work of American fiction proposed a more ambitious investigation of the history and vicious social conditions that characterized the emergent American Empire in the nineteenth century.”6 Delany borrows plot details from slave narratives and inserts his fictional story into a factual world of thick historical detail, frequently referring to events, places, and people.7 However, the inventions and anachronisms of the second half of the novel produce the kind of alternative history we associate with speculative fiction. It’s also here that the novel shows persistent interest in the speculative economy of slavery and the practice of betting on imagined futures. In addition to populating Blake with a catalogue of social types with stakes in the slave economy, Delany brings together two understandings of black futures: one in which slaves and slavery are imbricated in the speculative futurity of financial markets and one in which a hemispheric slave uprising takes the place of the American Civil War.8 Deidre Lynch remarks of the early realist novel that “characterization was valued for its usefulness to readers and writers who found themselves dwelling in a new commercial world, one altered by new trade routes and new forms of credit and full of strange commodities.”9 Strange commodities indeed who “found themselves dwelling” in Delany’s antebellum America, defined not just by human property but the attendant financial instruments of an expanding empire. As part of this novel’s documentary (or realist) impulse, Delany gives us the stock villain of the slave speculator and (more unusually) the stock market. Perhaps most surprisingly, he links black conspiracy fictions to finance capital. As yet undiscussed by critics, Blake’s attention to the speculative economy of slavery increases as the plot moves to Cuba, object of Southern expansionist ambition and key site of the illegal international slave trade...

Memory and Resistance: Doro’s Empire, Mary’s Rebellion, and Anyanwu as Lieu de Mémoire in Octavia E. Butler’s Mind of My Mind and Wild Seed

Can we create a liberated future without an understanding of our past? The role of history and memory in creating a liberated future are explored in many of African-American science fiction author ...

Professional societies and African American engineering leaders: Paving pathways and empowering legacies

Diversity and inclusion in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is a global issue. The challenging issues facing the world relating to STEM diversity cross national borders and require leveraging the talents of diverse constituents.1Active international efforts at inclusive talent development are being undertaken to empower persons from groups historically underrepresented in STEM communities.2,3The US National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME) reports that in the United States, African Americans are one of the most underrepresented minority groups in engineering relative to their population. This is in spite of a great deal of progress in “growing African American scientists, engineers, and technologists since the Howard University School of Engineering opened in 1910.”4The number of African Americans in engineering at all degree levels is not representative of their percentage in the US population. Table I shows a sampling of 2016 data from a National Science Foundation (NSF) survey of doctoral recipients in engineering.5Figure 1 illustrates a snapshot of African American representation in US colleges of engineering. These statistics show that African Americans remain underrepresented relative to US demographics.6–8

From Mealie Pap to Peanut Milk: The African Diaspora, Culinary Cosmopolitanism, and Mahatma Gandhi’s Evolving Views on Race and Diet

ABSTRACTIn jail in South Africa in January 1908, Mahatma Gandhi was served a South African breakfast staple known as mealie pap. Gandhi associated mealie pap with black South Africans and rejected it as unsuitable for Indians. One year later, however, he revised his opinion and actively encouraged Indians to eat mealie pap. Tracing Gandhi’s evolving approach to mealie pap reveals a profound shift in Gandhi’s views on race and diet. That shift was made visible some thirty years later when Gandhi turned to the African American scientist George Washington Carver in order to find a vegan alternative to milk.

The Process of Becoming: Identity Development of African American Female Science and Mathematics Preservice Teachers

ABSTRACTA group of 3 African American female preservice science and science teaching students majoring in a field of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) participated in a qualitative research study to share their experiences in STEM, reasons for their choice of major, obstacles and challenges, instances of racism or sexism, and their identity development. The students participated in semistructured, face-to-face interviews. The results showed that the females were not discouraged by their underrepresentation; were confident in their abilities; and expressed wide variation in their identity development related to race, gender, and field of study. Future studies should seek deeper insights into how STEM college student identities are developed and solidified in the predominantly White and male STEM culture.