If you can understand forces like electricity and magnetism, you can understand how a force like white supremacy works. That is why I hate apolitical scientists, because you're being willfully ignorant of reality for no logical reason. Your intolerance effortlessly translates into daily actions and honestly, just your personality. Ignoring such a big fact about the world means your ignorance is all you become. How could it not when you deny the truth at every turn?

Radical scientists like me, we want a world where knowledge is accurately valued. For too long people have overvalued white, male, capitalist, murderous knowledge and science has greatly suffered from that imbalance. Science is a fundamental pursuit of humanity and I think there are so many people out there whose purpose in life is scientific study & discovery. But a million killers have killed hundreds of millions who could've changed the world with their minds, eradicating that knowledge for no logical, rational, or valid emotional reason.

To me, it's pure logical sense that human diversity in science results in a more enlightened world for all, and that things improving for everyone is good for EVERYONE including YOURSELF. I'm selfish the same way every human is and it makes so much sense to grab the answer that will sustain us than kill us. That's why for so long my reaction to close-minded scientists was emotional, because the lack of base logic is upsetting. For them, their brain hears "circle" and goes to "square" while mine hears "circle" and goes to "sphere". The snap logic is so immediate, like sight words for elementary school kids. I guess that's why they act like children when you try to change their mind. I oscillate between condescension and empathy which makes me think I'm not best suited for dealing with ignorant scientists, because I think they deserve more empathy than I can muster.

Non-Western science production ideas-- how do we NOT design weapons?

I've been thinking about how to fight bombs and the first thought I have is force fields but like for real. Bombings are neutralized because your shit is protected. So is there anything in nature that actually does this? I think Western science would enjoy a nice dome Hunger Games style aka mechanical but I'm deeply curious to know if there's insect behavior or interactions between bacteria or weather patterns that can serve as templates for how to neutralize a bomb. There's so much we haven't laterally investigated and it's a shame to miss out on those opportunities. It's a shame things have gotten so specialized as they are without cultivation of the other side. My second thought is to create something that will let us survive a nuclear war if it happens except as soon as we have it, we'd nuke the world. That gets me thinking about us though, because who is that? I don't think this type of research could happen anywhere but the West because of its dominance in the scientific world (aka money, space, resources, education) but any research of the West is bound to produce a weapon before an instrument of healing.

One of the most dangerous weapons we have is science. Sometimes I think it’s the most dangerous. War is alive and war wants weapons. War and strife has been around for centuries, it’s what this very country is founded on: mass murder, genocide, indescribable torture and pain. And the weaponization of science, technology, and intellectual advancement has always been present. Our society controls science and the results of its most scientific enterprises-- products of mass humanity-- were biological and chemical and nuclear warfare. Our world has willingly created, sometimes fervently devoted itself to causing the most destruction and the most damage. Even the research done to make weapons can be a weapon itself. I used to think I was the only one, but I believe more people see this now: the world has been at war for at least a hundred years. I say one hundred because World War I and developments in weapons of mass destruction began. What human beings did to each other... What we do now is the same. We have different weapons that do different things and we're fighting in different places in different times but the violence is the same. Humanity is being hurt. Humanity is hurting itself because a part of it thinks it needs to survive at the expense of the whole, even though it needs the whole to exist. I know that our science is more advanced but what does advanced really mean? Now, we hurt more of humanity than before. We hurt more of the world than before. With every action, voluntary or involuntary, humanity hurts itself. Human beings hurt each other. That's what I see when I look at science, what I've seen these past few years stumbling my way through a science education at Columbia. ​I don't believe that's a world we have to live in.

Op-Ed for Physics Seminar Fall 2023 about my perspective on advancing diversity in physics.

​Excerpts: 
"Studies conducted by the American Institute of Physics show that the amount of Physics degrees awarded to Black, Latino, and Indigenous students across Bachelor’s, Masters, and PhDs has increased from 3% to 13% in the past 25 years. I would like to rephrase this data to show the problem in physics as felt by minority students. Around 90% of physicists, across every level of higher education within the past generation, have been white and predominantly male. Past generations are even more homogenous as women, people of color, people of lower socioeconomic status, and people with disabilities (to name a few disenfranchised groups) were absolutely and specifically not allowed entry into academic institutions. The thousands of people that have graduated from these schools, these overwhelming statistics: this is evidence of a white supremacist & capitalist ideal at work, operating in real time."

"I propose that an active counter to imbuing white supremacy into education and science and physics is to embrace interdisciplinary, collaborative research and not being afraid to do things that aren’t accepted by the current paradigm. Isn’t that part of science anyways, questioning not only inside a framework but the framework itself? Fixing diversity in physics requires large scale efforts to fix diversity in academia period. The issues in one field are not exclusive to that one when we are all part of the same academic body and this rapidly growing interconnected world."

"In the classroom, an interdisciplinary education naturally emphasizes the importance of everyone’s voices, and teacher collaboration leads to a strengthened learning environment while decreasing teacher burn-out... Nearly all real-world problems are complex and have elements that include numerous scientific disciplines. Having an interdisciplinary education directly teaches you complex problem-solving skills and keeps you on your feet with fresh perspectives and ideas. Furthermore, this type of collaboration would inevitably diversify your world socially. As physicists, practically every other department is more diverse than your own. Meeting new people and becoming comfortable working in a diverse environment yourself will make you a better teacher of diversifying class. Embracing an inclusive version of education, rather than the discriminative one currently prized by academia, is a step away from an old white supremacist ideal and towards the future of learning."

"I reject Western science’s claim that their conclusions about the world reflect all of humanity’s experiences. Having never seen a giraffe doesn’t mean they don’t exist, and what Western science is doing is ignoring giraffes they do see and claiming they don’t exist to everybody else, going around and spreading the narrative as far-reaching as possible. They actually caged up the giraffes and put them on display-- showed them to us-- and expect us to ignore their existence. I reject that notion completely. I would like you to leave this article questioning a lot, including this: why is there a rejection of love in science? Why do we not approach our analysis of the world this way, if it is a universal behavior of all humanity throughout all the recorded time we have? What do we gain from analyzing the world in a loveless fashion?" --page 12​

We live in an economic, political & social, and most significantly to my argument, scientific world that fundamentally looks at the world with a white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal (WSCP) lens.

I use the words white supremacy to emphasize how these methods are the result of one operating perspective, not a million different negative views and mistakes. bell hooks states so perfectly in her 1997 film titled Cultural Criticism & Transformation:

“To me an important breakthrough, I felt, in my work and that of others was the call to use the term white supremacy over racism, because racism in and of itself did not really allow for a discourse of colonization and decolonization, the recognition of the internalized racism within people of color and it was always in a sense keeping things at the level at which whiteness and white people remained at the center of the discussion. In my classroom I might say to students that you know that when we use the term white supremacy it doesn’t just evoke white people, it evokes a political world that we can all frame ourselves in relation to… And so for me those words were very much about the constant reminder, one of institutional construct, that we’re not talking about personal construct in the sense of, how do you feel about me as a woman, or how do you feel about me as a black person? But they really seem to me to evoke a larger apparatus…”

I use bell hooks’ terminology because I believe she was an author and philosopher that was able to identify something truly universal. As cliche as it may sound, love is something that has always existed in humanity and I believe she defined it perfectly. I do actually have one contrasting view to hers which is that I believe domination and love can coexist, when we all are able to understand that the love that binds us is more important than the power we wield. But besides that one caveat, I think she crystallized the ethereal concept of love into human values and actions that are done every day.

The Western view of energy-- that the Earth is an endless font of resources that warrants an insatiable urge to consume-- was a belief that emerged from white supremacy and European colonization The expansion of this European empire relied on “professionalizing” the bio and field sciences like evolution, botany, zoology, and geology (Tilley 112). Patent laws and communication networks developed to aid the goal of global European colonization (Tilley). Imperial, capitalist motives drove the paths that Western science took to create itself.​ ​

Daniela Bleichmar’s book, Visible Empire, discusses how botany was used as a tool by European empires solely to strengthen their economic position in the world. She writes, “These images select portions of a specimen… and present them on an overwhelmingly white page… It was the shared pictorial language of European natural history as part of a global cosmopolitan practice… The erasure of geographical specificity is related to an extractive vision of nature and of the relation between Europe and the rest of the world…”. She uses the term “global white space, local color” to describe how plants were studied by imperial scientists of that age through complete divorce of its origin. They were placed on completely white backgrounds, visually erasing their environments and marketing them as a simple product that could circulate around the world. Their scientific practice did not value the local world already existing around their samples-- it actually said they were more correct without them, a completely unfounded yet widely accepted assumption. Economic botany paved the way for more colonizing and white supremacist sciences, particularly in fields related to humanity and biology. ​

Western medicine has been a field driven by European colonization and white supremacy since its beginning. The Diseased Heart of Africa: Medicine, Colonialism, and the Black Body, an essay by Jean Comaroff, states that both medicine and colonization were at its base, “... driven by a global sense of man that had emerged out of the enlightenment. Both concerned the extensions of “rational” control over domains of nature… medicine both informed and was informed by imperialism in Africa and elsewhere.” The Enlightenment’s view of man was a man who values his racial, class, gender, and moral superiority.  This man is as far divorced from Africa as possible and should maintain that distance to constantly assure his excellence. Comaroff discusses the cultural view of Africans, that they were “... noxious organisms that threatened to invade the inviolable world of white order,” an evil contagion come to destroy the West (Comaroff 234). Daring to taint your future children and generations through mingling with Africans, especially African women, would directly contribute to the deterioration of the West (Comaroff 318). From the 17th century, Europeans abhorred the cultural and linguistic differences between them and Africans (Gomez 234). They viewed their methods of communication as worthless, indecipherable and meaningless (Gomez 234). Europeans regarded African and Afro-Caribbean medicine as unscientific and disregarded their findings, shoving them out of secularity and into the realm of religion. Religion is not a practice free from these biases either; exclusion of African knowledge has become commonplace.

People are born into a world with problematic principles and subsequently bring those into the laboratory with them. These laboratories were built in the West to be hubs of research, or were created throughout the world through colonization to advance the project of Western science. The products coming out of these laboratories-- technologies, policies, facts, culture-- come out with their view to continue spreading its prejudice. They serve as evidence of the legitimacy of Western science. Warwick Anderson remarks in his article, “Where Every Prospect Pleases and Only Man is Vile”: Laboratory Medicine as Colonial Discourse, “Medical articles, geographical and political texts, administrative reports, novels, and popular travel accounts all represent different levels of the extraction and appropriation of the speech and the bodies of both the colonized and the laboring colonizers… The recognition that even the most formally structured technical knowledge may be implicated in colonial appropriation and acquisition is long overdue.” (Anderson 509). These documents legitimize the institutions research is conducted at and gives them power to direct entire disciplines of science. Anderson namechecks “Joseph Hayden, vice-governor-general of the Islands in the 1930s,” [who] understood the very existence of the [Manila Bureau of Science]in the Philippines and the success of its publications… as evidence of superior American rationality and modernity (Anderson 517). Hayden, along with other scientists of the bureau, returned from their Pacific laboratories to start branches of medicine at Harvard and the United States Army medical school (Anderson 518). They developed the arsenal of Western science, another method to subjugate and (mis)interpret the world. Western medicine has played an incredibly important role in the development of Western culture since its beginnings in the 17th century (Gomez 243). In the 19th century, British colonialism and its universalist claims about humanity led to the addition of biomedicine into Western science, propelling it into a position to affect governance and culture (Comaroff 306-307, 324). This also led to the promotion of individualism and rejection of community, declaring it as “primitive custom” that must be isolated from “modern civilization.” (Mandler 36).

Final Essay for Global Histories of Science taught by Marwa Elshakry 
Initially written in May 2023, last edit in June 2023

Written for a graduate history seminar at Columbia University so it's kinda long. Portions of the essay are below as well as a list of authors I used for this paper. My essay is mainly philosophical but with lots of history to back it up.

Referenced Authors and Texts
Warwick Anderson- "Where Every Prospect Pleases and Only Man is Vile": Laboratory Medicine as Colonial Discourse

Daniela Bleichmar- Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment

Jean Comaroff- The Diseased Heart of Africa: Medicine, Colonialism, and the Black Body

Lorraine Daston- The History of Science and the History of Knowledge

Pablo F. Gomez- [Un]Muffled Histories: Translating Bodily Practices in the Early Modern Caribbean

Peter Mandler- Chapter 2- Looking Around the World in the book Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History

Sadiah Qureshi- Chapter 1- Looking to Our Ancestors in the book Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History

Helen Tilley- Racial Science, Geopolitics, and Empires: Paradoxes of Power