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Final Essay for Philosophy of Science taught by Jenann Ismael at Columbia University 
Excerpts below: -- "Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions describes science as dependent on three properties. First, it depends on a united scientific community. Second, science exerts its authority over society through scientific institutions. Third, future generations are trained to practice science through learning from textbooks, which standardize scientific learning. I see issues with each aspect of Kuhn’s definition of science.
What I have experienced, as somebody who considers themselves a scientist, is that first, the scientific community is deeply divided by identity. Institutions that maintain science’s authority over society are historically predominantly white institutions, male-only institutions, and in general are rife with discrimination. Secondly, the authority institutions continue to wield today is ingrained with principles and values from a society built on colonization and slavery. Columbia University was founded in 1754, twenty-two years older than America itself, and has a long history of white, Western supremacy. Look at the discriminatory processes you have to go through to even enter the school, let alone receive opportunities, the suffering and displacement it's brought to Harlem, the sanctioned KKK rallies that used to take place on Low Steps. Thirdly, textbook writing is a heavily edited and biased process that very intentionally chooses who gets included. A study published by the The Royal Society in 2020 has shown that approximately 90% of the scientists we learn about in textbooks are male and around 97% are white. The way Kuhn talks about who the scientific community is composed of throughout Scientific Revolutions are the people who we are taught can be scientists. His repetitive use of men-- 58 times throughout the book, whereas people is used 11 times and women is used 0 times-- when referring to scientists shows patriarchy is fundamental to his conceptualization of science. -- As non-white non-male scientists like myself progress in our scientific careers, we begin to see how there is rarely space for both who we are as scientists and who we are as people. The sentiment I’ve heard repeatedly by older generations of scientists is that one’s identity “doesn’t matter” if the science they do is good. This “value-less” view of science is seen as positive and is marketed towards future generations, selling the idea that going into science means that you will only be valued for your intelligence, that personal and/or societal biases don’t exist when you become a scientist. But the value-less view of science is incorrect and harmful to minority scientists. There is no “insulation of the scientific community from society”. Kuhn failed to take into consideration that scientists, who are all white men in his writing, are able to separate themselves from society because their identity places them at the top of the social hierarchy, where they can remain blissfully ignorant about societal issues because it doesn’t affect them. Science assumes that a scientist is a white man and because education was limited to white men for so long, science became seen as “value-less”. In truth, it values white men, solely acknowledges them, created institutions to further their pursuit of knowledge at the expense of other races and genders, and only writes about white men in its textbooks which are only written by white men.
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