The Black Experience in Scientific Academia: Charlie Parker’s Ornithology, Professor Whitney’s Neurogenetics, and a look forward

Words by Mykel Barrett
Cover graphic by Aspasia Celia Tsampas

The Campus’ Mykel Barrett dives into this two-part series sharing his experiences as a black student pursuing the sciences, along with a discussion with Dr. Karen Hubbard and Dr. Osceola Whitney, two black professors of Biology at The City College of New York. This is part 2 of 2.

Human ears have been graced by the sound of bird chirps and whistles probably since the dawn of time, but how many people really listen to these songs and seek to understand the choices behind the birds’ “musical” arrangements?

Dr. Osceola Whitney is one of such people.

Professor Osceola Whitney

An Assistant Professor in the Biology Department of The City College of New York (CCNY), Dr. Whitney studies the neuromolecular mechanisms underlying vocal-motor control in zebra finches. On South Campus, at the state-of-the-art Center for Discovery and Innovation (CDI), Dr. Whitney leads a team that combines the latest molecular biology techniques with transriptomics, cistromics, and genomics to advance understanding of how zebra finches learn to effectuate the complex patterns of rhythm and melody that we know as bird songs.

His work has unveiled some of the single gene constituents and epigenetic modifications involved in the gene regulatory networks that orchestrate the formation and maintenance of zebra finch vocalization neural systems. His work additionally helps to concretize many of the theories that concern how the interplay of genes and the external environment shapes the evolution of animal behavior.

 Today, Dr. Whitney is a member of l’intelligentsia americaine, but before he became formally hyper-educated and obtained the myriad of professional appointments typically associated with his social class, who was he?

Intersection with historical names. Source: TravelMag.com

Dr. Whitney was born in Harlem, a former epicenter of African American jazz and the place Alain Leroy Locke called the ‘Mecca of the New Negro.’ Though he grew up in Queens, he frequently visited his family on Saint Nicholas Terrace by 128th Street, merely 5 blocks away from where he works today. “I was very familiar with these grounds,” he says, “but in a very different context.”

 In Queens, Dr. Whitney grew up in a sociological environment shaped by the, “standard African American background,” which he defines as being influenced by the legacy of the Maafa and Great Migration. Like most African Americans, his family’s roots run deep in the American South, the North American hub of human trafficking, where much of the separation of families, savage acts of violence, and monstrous barbarity against “black” people occurred.

Though the Civil Rights Act of 1964 abrogated racial segregation within the United States, Dr. Whitney grew up in a practically racially homogenous community which he describes as “very black.” By virtue of historical happenstance, he says, “all of my friends and the people I associated with were black.” This level of demographic pitch blackness was not whitened at all when he hit “the college age,” and attended Lincoln University, a Historically Black College founded in 1854 during the American Civil War. At Lincoln, he was exposed to a plethora of “admirable professors,” and “black professionals,” whom he “really looked up to,” and sought to emulate the positive characteristics of.

Upon graduating with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, Dr. Whitney found himself, once again, at another black institution, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. At this HBCU, one of his professors thought that he would be interested in a neuroscience Ph.D. program at Florida State University (FSU), an institution dubbed by Dr. Whitney, as “historically-white.” After reluctantly matriculating, he grew enamored with the field that connected the immaterial concepts that he had studied in his psychology undergraduate and graduate programs with their physical biological bases in the brain. “At FSU,” he says, “I left the nest of the black community and sort of ventured out into a world where people didn't look like me.”

“They were speaking this new neuroscience language that was very different,” not only in jargon, but also in dialect, Dr. Whitney explained. He described these encounters as “daunting,” and called the experience of being the only black person in the room to be “isolating,” — a feeling further exacerbated by instances when his peers explicitly stated, “You don’t look like you belong here.”

Despite these challenges, he still performed at levels on par with, and many times surpassing, that of his peers.

The terms “implicit bias” and “microaggression” are seldom mentioned outside of cultural competence bootcamps, classes and/or other training programs. Although minstrelsy “ended” decades ago, the tropes of: “the crass Negro,” “the Negro as nincompoop,” and “the Negro as entertainer,” still permeate the national ethos in our modern day. The same racist implicit biases and microaggressions that cause CCNY’s academic advisors to ask black students, “How’s the season?” despite them not playing basketball, and then advise them to not take science courses because they assume the students cannot handle the rigor due to their skin color, are the same biases and microaggressions that caused Dr. Whitney to be ordered to “move this,” or “take care of that,” when he was mistaken to be a janitorial staff member.

The same implicit biases and microaggressions that cause the NYPD to unconstitutionally stop and search black biology students, who soon will attrite their Sisyphean efforts at criminalizing another black body upon finding a copy of Nature Reviews Genetics in their school bag, are responsible for what Dr. Whitney experienced in his early career when security officers IDed him upon entering a research facility.

It is almost as if they thought: “RED ALERT! RED ALERT! AN UNIDENTIFIED BLACK MAN HAS ENTERED A RESEARCH FACILITY.”

Dr. Whitney’s skin caused him to immediately be viewed with suspicion. Even after showing them his university ID card, security persisted their harassment and asked him to produce his state ID, perhaps to assess the congruence of the information contained on each card, and/or to verify that Dr. Whitney was not committing forgery and/or impersonation.

Looking beyond these arguably petty examples of racism that only create mere social discomfort, in a professional setting, these subconscious biases become more powerful. In fields that are disproportionately white, like STEM fields, these biases can act as hinderances to growth, and sometimes even preclude career advancement, especially when the writers of recommendation letters let their racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, and/or ageism inspire them to write inaccurate and limiting statements.

Educational disparity is a social problem that plagues America. On campus, undergraduate students notice that there are more black peers in the humanities than in STEM. They notice that the more advanced the STEM classes become, the less black classmates there are. In the introductory courses there may be about two or three black colleagues, but progressing through a degree, the number usually lessens. This situation can be frightening.  

Even more frightening, is when a student wants to seek counsel from trusted professors who they look up to, but cannot confer with. How can the very white members of faculty understand the heft of their students’ lived experiences when they do not know what it is like to constantly have to code switch, and in a sense, be someone they are not, in order to not be subconsciously deemed as intellectually inferior? How can students speak with mentors who have shared how they needed small classes to understand dense subjects like chemistry, and insensitively relish about how grateful they are to have attended private school, who have no idea of what it is like to go through two years of public high school with practically no chemistry instruction at all because NYC is experiencing a shortage of STEM teachers?

CCNY biology is lucky to have professors like Dr. Whitney, who studies songbird vocalization, and understands why the caged bird sings. The mentor-mentee dynamic is different when the mentor and mentee both know why caged birds sing.

The educational disparities and above-mentioned examples of both covert and overt racism that African Americans face in academia should prompt the question, “What is the solution?” Dr. Whitney emphasized the importance of affirmative action-based programs and how they contribute to solving what he calls, “this complex and much larger social problem.”

Affirmative action-based programs provided funding for scholarships and fellowships that enabled Dr. Whitney to consider attending schools that had tuition costs too formidable for even the best of his financial situation’s armamentarium at the time. “I would not be here today if it weren’t for affirmative action,” he emphatically remarked.

Dr. Whitney feels indebted to give back to his community in any way possible. One way he does so is by recruiting students of color into his lab in order to provide them with mentorship, something he considers to be “one of most important” factors influencing career advancement and professional development. “Even now as a junior professor, I seek mentorship from those who’ve done this before me, who can help me become a Full [Professor],” said Dr. Whitney.

 The action of serving minoritized demographic groups is not a practice that is exclusive to Dr. Whitney. Several biology faculty members demonstrate clear commitment towards these aims. For example, Chairman Jonathan Levitt runs the Maximizing Access to Research Careers (MARC) program, which provides support to underrepresented biomedical and/or behavioral science undergraduate students. Dr. Karen Hubbard runs the CCNY-MSK Partnership for Cancer Research Program, which supports research on health disparities and attracts minority students of all levels to training opportunities and professional development resources. Dr. Mark Emerson solicits funding from the National Science Foundation to recruit early-stage minority biology students into his lab. He also works to extend science into under-resourced public middle schools that his research mentees formerly attended, as well as into Mott Hall and P.S. 161, public schools across the street from CCNY that serve homogeneously colored pupils as well.

And of course, there are many other efforts unmentioned. Still, with all these endeavors, the faculty body is noticeably very white. The graduate student body is noticeably far whiter than the undergraduate one. These conspicuous demographic disparities prompt a deeper examination and leave one to question: what more can CCNY do to foster inclusion and diversity, especially at the graduate and faculty level?

I believe in the power of narrative. The time has come for us all to start initiating the uncomfortable conversations we need to be having. I believe that subjecting ideas about how to create a more equitable society and that contestation in the intellectual arena can be constructive.

These conversations are necessary because the first day I walked to South Campus to go to Dr. Emerson’s office, I noticed that I was walking from a poorly maintained, colored, undergraduate space, into a well-maintained, white, graduate/post-graduate space. After working in Dr. Emerson’s lab, CCNY lab courses start to feel weird; like when CHEM10401 scales do strange things, or when BIO20700 deionization instruments produce water that gives conductivity readings far from what is expected for deionized water, or when while studying flagellar regeneration in BIO22900, you realize the reason your data looks crazy is not because you cannot pipette well, but because you wasted the last few weeks running experiments and collecting data from batches of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii where 90% of the organisms were dead.

These conversations are necessary because sometimes Division of Science professors find it appropriate to stop lecture and racially profile me in front of the entire class.

These conversations are necessary because sometimes, after I say “Good afternoon,” and use my card to enter the CDI building, CCNY Public Safety officers angrily ask me, “Where are you going?!” as if I should not be allowed to enter the CDI because my  genome does not harbor the mutations that hamper melanogenesis.  

CCNY enrollment data, by ethnicity, for the undergraduate and doctoral level, which illustrate, “the higher up I go, the less of me I see,” and Dr. Hubbard’s noticing about demographic disparities, which is, “The graduate students look very different from our undergrads.”

These conversations are necessary because in a MARC meeting I heard advice that [you’ll] be fine during the graduate school interview process, “as long as you’re not wearing those Rasta dreads,” as if, MARC does not exist because of some of the ideas conceived in the slums of Jamaica, by dreadlocked Rastafarian philosophers, that were transplanted to America where they helped catalyze the Civil Rights Movement; as if during his medical school interviews, CCNY’s Maurice, for example, was supposed to be judged by his hairstyle instead of his curriculum vitae, GPA, standardized exam scores, and letters of recommendation; as if Dr. Selby should have been disqualified from an opportunity that enabled him to become a physician, and now, a Professor of Medicine at Emory University School of Medicine, because of “those Rasta dreads;” as if on a campus with a Caribbean student population large enough for there to be a Caribbean Student Union Association and Caribbean students in the MARC program, the implicit biases and microaggressions permeating the statement “...as long as you’re not wearing those Rasta dreads,” demonstrates the speaker has the consciousness and cultural competence necessary to foster the mutual respect needed for the MARC program to work when they interface with students like me, whose immigrant mother worked two, sometimes three jobs to get them into college at 18 instead of prison, who wears those disparaged “Rasta dreads.” It is time to think about what it truly means to promote diversity and inclusion.

We have seen the effects of Kazi Maisha’s #MacaulySOWhite. Let us expand this type of effort to include the Division of Science and create: #CCNYBiologySOWhite; and/or: CCNYGradProgramsSOWhite. Has anyone else noticed the immense Eurocentrism in Introduction to Visual Arts of the World? Should we create #CCNYArtHistorySOWhite too? What issues exist in other departments? In response to Dr. Hubbard’s insights, what ideas would be elicited by the creation of #CCNYProfessorsSOMale? 

According to an Inside Higher Ed article, “Black student leaders noted that the amount of stress they endure and the time-consuming nature of activist work — plus the racist incidents that inspire this work — can cause students to fall behind their studies or can become so emotionally burdensome that they drop out...” My advocacy journalism must now be put on pause — I have AELKS to catch-up on, and lab reports to do. Hopefully, when I press my pause button, the people at CCNY who have the power to make positive change will press, ‘play.’