The Black Experience in Scientific Academia: Too much division causes disease in the body and in society

Words by Mykel Barrett
Cover graphic by Aspasia Celia Tsampas
Photos provided by Mykel Barrett and credited in captions

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 1 of 2.

Cancer took my grandmother from me, and cancer continues to take approximately 9.5 million loved ones from their friends and families every year. Cancer, in essence, is caused by excessive cell division. Cellular senescence, which refers to when cells stop dividing, has been appreciated as a process that protects against the uncontrolled cell division associated with cancer. Dr. Karen Hubbard, Professor of Biology at the City College of New York (CCNY), studies how the genes regulating senescence are expressed. Her work investigates the post-transcriptional mechanisms that enable precursor mRNA (pre-mRNA) to develop into mature mRNA, a paradigm that has not yet been fully investigated before within the context of cellular aging.

When I started out at CCNY, I struggled to find professors who looked like me. I remember looking for research opportunities by searching faculty directories at several institutions to see which scientists were conducting research that I would be interested in. I scrolled through page after page, often never seeing a black faculty member. I was reminded of the colorism that makes my half-white father more favored in the eyes of society than my own darker skin tone, which is only one-fourth white. I was reminded of Langston Hughes’ “I Too.” I was reminded of American history:

“The preference for [light skin] finds painful precedent in black culture. It dates back to slavery when the lightest blacks – whose skin color was often the result of rape by white slave masters – were favored over their darker kin because they were closer in color and appearance to dominant society. (Dyson, 2004:156).

A Kumina ensemble in Jamaica that provides insight on how Congo Square looked and sounded during the 1700’s. Source: National Library of Jamaica

When I first saw Dr. Osceola Whitney, in his office which is adjacent to Dr. Emerson’s, I felt more at peace. I felt even more at peace when I found out he was born where the Harlem Renaissance occurred, listened to Hip-Hop as a youth, just like me, and whose father enjoys jazz. This genre was birthed largely in part by Africans of Central (Kongolese) and West African extraction as they dressed as nkisi and played the songs of Africa in “Congo Square” during the 1700’s in East New Orleans. The sight of Dr. Whitney alone, helped me to, in the words of former President Barack Obama, “reconcile the world as I’d found it with the terms of my birth.” I thought to myself, “There’s at least one.” When I encountered Dr. Hubbard while registering for courses last semester, I felt even more relieved — “There’s two!” I thought, “If they’ve ‘made it,’ maybe I can actually pull this off with hard work and careful planning too.”

To the best of my knowledge, as a junior biology student at CCNY, Dr. Whitney and Dr. Hubbard are the only black professors in our entire department.

Dr. Hubbard grew up in a homogeneously black community in Chicago, now dubbed as Chiraq. She was alive when President Kennedy was shot, and she marched in Civil Rights protests as a child.

Professor Karen Hubbard

When Dr. Hubbard recounted her experience growing up in a homogeneously black community, I remembered that my communities in the Bronx are homogeneously “colored.” The “white people” here now, primarily of Southern and Eastern European extraction would be thrown into the ghettoes with black people that were forged by the redlining and discriminatory lending practices that make the Bronx the Bronx today, because Anglo-Saxon Old Stock Americans did not see them as “white enough.” I remembered the first assignment I took on at my first journalism internship, which led me to notice that primarily colored community districts, like the one my former high school is located in, have average SAT scores about 300 points lower than the whiter, more affluent neighborhoods. Here I am, 21 years old, reflecting that I grew up in communities that were just as segregated as the communities Professor Hubbard grew up in. So, how much has really changed since the 1960’s?

Dr. Hubbard attended a high school that she says, “had a reputation like Bronx Science,” for which, “you had to take a test to get in.” As we talked, I remembered my own experience taking the SHSAT. I had no serious preparation for it, I was a little boy with no understanding of how the world worked. To be fair, today at 21, I am still learning how the world works. But, back then, I was an A-student that went on to graduate middle school as the valedictorian. However, interestingly, the first time I had ever encountered the basic circle equations and 𝜋 was while taking the SHSAT — and I am not ashamed by that because I did not choose to be born into the circumstances I was. As Malcom X said, “Don't be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn't do what you do or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn't know what you know today.” My score fell within 5 scaled points of the cutoff needed to get into a specialized high school outside of my borough, and I am proud of it.

Ruby Bridges, 6, being escorted by US Marshals as she attended a previously all-white school. From the Associated Press.

As Dr. Hubbard continued her story, telling me that she had eggs thrown at her as she walked to attend classes at her prestigious high school because she was a black body infiltrating white space, I realized I was blessed to have the opportunity to have this conversation with a black academic from a different epoch of American history. I was reminded of Ruby Bridges. Too often, my generation thinks, “Oh this was a long time ago,” but how long ago was the material in our history textbooks if in college I can interact with the very people who have lived it?

The energy from Executive Order 10925 allowed me to be able to participate in Albert Einstein College of Medicine’s enrichment program when I was in high school.

The energy from Executive Order 10925 was what allowed me to apply to 20 colleges when I was a senior at CIMS for free.

The energy from Executive Order 10925 is what allowed me to participate in the Emerson Lab’s scientific outreach and research training program.

Me, learning endotracheal intubation at the SNMA’s RMEC hosted by Einstein, when I was in high school.

The energy from Executive Order 10925 is what allows me to be able to receive support via our MARC program.  

The energy from Executive Order 10925 is what has caused many of the 12 summer undergraduate research programs that I have applied to be committed to recruiting underrepresented and minoritized groups to biomedical science.

The energy from Executive Order 10925 is what helped Dr. Hubbard become a tenured black, female Professor of Biology at CCNY.

But this experience was a process, filled with both achievements and mistakes. And although everyone makes mistakes, race and gender affect how people perceive those mistakes. Dr. Hubbard explained, “When I messed up, it was, y’know, ‘Oh she’s only here because of affirmative action,’ whereas when my white peers messed up, they didn’t go through the same level of scrutiny...”

When Dr. Hubbard told me about the discrimination she has faced, not only for being born black but also for being born female, I remembered the power of patriarchy. The ideas from the days of psychometrics and times when female cranial capacity was used to justify claims like, “Women are less intelligent than men,” still reach from history and grip-on to modern times. This theme is discussed in CCNY’s sociocultural anthropologist Dr. Stanley Thangaraj’s Anthropology 101 course. Dr. Thangaraj was an engineering major before he converted to anthropology and mentioned that the top 3 to 5 scores on engineering exams were usually female students, despite sexist ideas that engineering is a male field.

Dr. Hubbard recounted when she brought ideas, “that were cutting-edge at the time,” forth to white male academics, they did not take her seriously... but when a white male discussed these same ideas later at a conference, suddenly the ideas were magically now reputable. This experience suggested to her that white male scientists are perceived as more trustworthy and competent than black female scientists, even when they are saying the same thing. Might this reason explain why my black 6th-grade science teacher always reminded me that I would have to work 2-3 times as hard to achieve the same things that others did with less effort? For women, is it 4-5 times as hard, as opposed to just 2-3?

Anti-woman implicit biases and microaggressions cause much more than emotional discomfort. Sometimes, one’s recommenders’ sexism and racism compel them to write words that put a spoke in the wheels of professional development and career advancement.

After her postdoc, Dr. Hubbard sought faculty positions. She applied to a myriad of places and never successfully secured a faculty position until one of her recommendation letter writers died. It was not until after his death that people began to tell her what he wrote about her. He said that she could teach but that he could not see her being successful as a researcher.

 Dr. Hubbard believes that in CCNY Biology, the problems with diversity and inclusion do not lie at the undergraduate level, but instead, at all levels above the undergraduate level. “The graduate students look very different from our undergrads,” says Professor Hubbard. If we really want to right the racist wrongs of history, more must be done, to recruit people with coarser hair and more richly melanated skin into CCNY Biology graduate programs, and graduate programs worldwide. The same goes for faculty positions. Dr. Hubbard says, “Two black professors in a science department is a lot since at many institutions, there are none; but there can be more at City.” Reflecting on the hiring process, she recounted times when she served on the department’s Search Committee. Dr. Hubbard says there have been instances where she watched her colleagues choose males over equally qualified females and white people over equally qualified non-white people.

“In those cases, I would’ve chosen to hire the females and non-white people. And that is my bias!” she affirmed.

The question is: is such a bias, that would contribute to more women and people of color in science, beneficial in creating a more equitable society? And the follow-up is: were Dr. Hubbard’s colleagues’ biases, that lead to less women, and people of color in science, beneficial in creating a more equitable society?

 Allies do not have to be black or female. “Some of the best mentorship I’ve ever received in life, came from a white person,” insists Dr. Hubbard. The same applies for me. Anyone can be a part of the solution.

 Dr. Hubbard expressed that she is committed to promoting diversity and inclusion at CCNY and hopes her efforts impact biomedical science as a whole. She has mentored many underrepresented minority students and has served on advisory committees at CCNY to increase underrepresented minorities in the sciences such as the MARC/RISE and TREND programs. She has been a Linkage Fellow for the Minority Affairs Committee of ASCB and was on the Task Force for Minority Affairs Committee of the Gerontological Society of America (GSA). Dr. Hubbard was the PI/PD for the MBRS/SCORE program at CCNY from 2002-2011, a program designed to promote faculty research development at minority-serving institutions. Dr. Hubbard received funding in 2002 for a U56 planning grant to develop collaborative research and training between CCNY and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. In 2008, she received funding as the CCNY PI for a U54 Partnership with MSKCC. The long-term goals of this Partnership are to reduce cancer health disparities (source.)

Growing up in the Bronx, I thought that the widespread obesity, asthma, mental illness, drug abuse, etc., that I saw every day was normal. It was not until high school when I heard biostatisticians, epidemiologists, and public health specialists present to me what it meant to be poor and non-white.

 A scientist, a rose who grew from a crack in the concrete of our nation’s ghettoes in California, also expressed to me that gunshots interrupting elementary school recess were not a normal phenomenon either. He had not seriously realized it was not normal until he began medical school. Immediately, the times when childhood fun was interrupted and my elementary school’s students were rushed inside during recess after folks started “lettin’ it off,” popped into my head, and so did the memories of all the Mykels who never got a chance to graduate elementary school, or middle school, or high school, or have a 5th, or 18th, or 22nd birthday, because they were killed by stray bullets.

Our department is lucky to have scientists like Dr. Hubbard, who has an idiosyncratic sociopolitical perspicacity afforded to her by the happenstances of history that enables her to understand the lived experiences of certain students and support them in ways that only people like her can.

Dr. Hubbard, Dr. Christine Li, Dr. Anuradha Janakiraman, Dr. Amy Berkov, Dr. Ana Carnaval, Dr. Hysell Oviedo, and all the female members of the CCNY scientific community are inspirational.

I whole-heartedly believe that Women in Science (WinS) is one of the most important organizations at CCNY. But, City College, what more can you do to serve your black members of faculty and student body? Think about this every day, not only during Black History Month.

I have a dream, that one day, phenotypic characteristics will be politically meaningless and pieces like this one are never written again. I have a dream, that one day, “the colour of a man's skin [will be of] no more significance than the colour of his eyes.” I love America and dream that one day, in America, no matter where they go, my Hispanic and Black nieces will not experience what I know they will. I am aware that I “may not get there” in this lifetime, but one day, “we, as a people, will” bring society there.