Core Concepts
- Elizabeth Betita Martinz
White supremacy, scientific racism, and extractivism are foundational core concepts for approaching anti-racism work in STEMM. A historical analysis is required in order to recognize their embeddedness within current STEMM practices and to identify and implement interventions at the individual, institutional, and systemic levels. History can provide a powerful lens for understanding disparities and inequities in the participation and experiences of Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color and in the distribution of resources in higher education and STEMM. Black, Indigenous, and Latinx groups continue to be underrepresented in all STEMM fields relative to their numbers in the U.S. adult working age population, as are many groups of Asian descent. Racism is a root cause of underrepresentation of Black, Indigenous, and other scholars of color across STEMM. Racism is embedded in STEMM, as institutions of higher education and research organizations in the U.S. and other parts of the world operate within a culture that systematically privileges whiteness, i.e., a white supremacy culture, that dictates accepted and replicated norms and practices to the exclusion of others (Callwood et al. 2022).
White Supremacy
White supremacy is "a political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of intuitions and social settings"(Francis Lee Ansley 1989: 1024). White supremacy justifies pervasive, deep-rooted, and long-standing exploitation, control, and violence directed at other racial and ethnic groups (Kivel, 2017).
Scientific Racism
The National Human Genome Research Institute at the U.S. National Institutes of Health has a useful definition of scientific racism as: "an ideology that appropriates the methods and legitimacy of science to argue for the superiority of white Europeans and the inferiority of non-white people whose social and economic status have been historically marginalized. Like eugenics, scientific racism grew out of: the misappropriation of revolutionary advances in medicine, anatomy and statistics during the 18th and 19th centuries; Charles Darwin's theory of evolution through the mechanism of natural selection, and Gregor Mendel's laws of inheritance." (Fact Sheet on Eugenics and Scientific Racism, updated May 18, 2022.)
Scientific racism upholds the false belief of biological and evolutionary differences among races, which has been used to justify slavery, violence, and discrimination, and underlies many current racial health disparities.
Extractivism
Extractivism is more than just the removal of natural resources from the earth for capital gain, and is tied with exploitative geopolitical, economic and social processes related to capitalism and colonialism. A recent review of the term defined the concept as "a complex ensemble of self-reinforcing practices, mentalities, and power differentials underwriting and rationalizing socio-ecologically destructive modes of organizing life through subjugation, violence, depletion, and non-reciprocity" (Chagnon et al. 2022).
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Extractivism is deeply associated with the following:
Racial Capitalism
Racial capitalism refers to the historical process in which capitalism and racism collaborated through slavery, colonialism, and genocide to produce a modern world system that continues to enact violence in racialized ways (Pirtle 2020).
Settler Colonialism
Settler colonialism and its legacies speak to the practice of destroying and disappearing Indigenous peoples, their lives and knowledge for the establishment of a new colonial society on the expropriated land (Wolfe, 2006). In Western science and education, the process of setter colonialism is inherent in the invisibilized dynamics of organization, governance, curricula, and assessment that influence knowledge and research practices. These dynamics are both informed by and perpetuate settler perspectives and worldviews.
Imperialism
Imperialism and its legacies speak to the relationships between empire building and the practices of racialized economic dispossession, exclusion, and destruction of Indigenous peoples and colonial subjects. The projects of imperialism and colonialism have historically been supported by scientific racism and extractivist research practices. Western science, including the foundation of many disciplines as well as the development of technology, has roots in the imperialistic exploitation of human and non-human resources. Western knowledge production is entangled in legitimized forms of violence that contribute to the reproduction of racialized exclusions.