Thursday, October 20, 2022

Overcoming racism in science: A Nature special issue. Really!

When a once prestigious scientific journal spreads propaganda and demagoguery!

Shocking and disgusting! Pseudoscience!

A well known family owned German media giant, i.e. "Holtzbrinck Publishing Group", owns Nature journal!

As if only Western Europeans committed racism and colonization! Absolutely absurd and a gross distortion of history! Take the transatlantic slave trade: Who actually enslaved Africans and sold them to Europeans? Other Africans!

As if only white people are capable of and have been committing racism! Racism can has been found to exist among humans of all skin colors!

The lifetime career criminal and drug addict George Floyd is mentioned numerous times as if he was a saint and martyr! Absolutely absurd!

A heavy regurgitation of ideological platitudes!

"... Among those worst excesses is racism. For centuries, science has built a legacy of excluding people of colour [???] and those from other historically marginalized groups from the scientific enterprise. ...
Nature has played a part in creating this racist legacy. After the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2020, Nature committed to becoming an agent of change, and helping to end discriminatory practices and systemic racism. ...
Systemic racism
“I didn’t see another Black person in computer science until more than a decade after high school,” says Juan Gilbert, now at the University of Florida in Gainesville. ...
Building a fairer future
Proposals to rename buildings, remove statues and rewrite curricula have become a central theme in discussions about combating racism in academia. ...
taking concrete steps to counter technology’s discriminatory biases, tackling the reality of racism today [???] is essential in building a more inclusive future for science and the society it serves."

"... Take Thomas Jefferson, the third US president, who drafted the Declaration of Independence of 1776. Jefferson is widely considered to be among the founders of liberalism and the idea of meritocracy. The declaration includes some of the most well-rehearsed words in the English language: that “all men are created equal”. And yet Jefferson, who was both a scientist and a slave owner, also thought that people of African descent were inferior to white people [???]. ...
A wave of anti-racism statements followed Floyd’s murder in 2020. Research funders and universities, publishers and individual journals such as Nature all published statements in support of eliminating racism from science. ...
Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the expansion of the Black Lives Matter movement into science, Nature was among those institutions that pledged to listen, learn and change. ..."

"... captain, James Cook, had been given secret instructions to continue onwards in what became Britain’s colonial takeover of Australia and New Zealand.
This is not an isolated example of a scientific effort that owes its existence to the racist exploitation of humanity. ...
Science’s history is enmeshed with racism and colonization. It should not have needed the murder of George Floyd, yet one more Black man killed at the hands of police, for such truths to be restated, as Nature and other scientific journals did in June 2020. ...
Each of the guest editors has a connection to Africa. For two of us, C.W. and M.N., the continent is a place where our ancestral connection was violently separated. Because of the transatlantic trade in enslaved people, aided by Europe’s empires, it is practically impossible for us to know which village or town in east, west, central or southern Africa our ancestors were taken from. ..."

Overcoming racism in science: A Nature special issue

Science must overcome its racist legacy: Nature’s guest editors speak We are leading Nature on a journey to help decolonize [???] research and forge a path towards restorative justice and reconciliation.

Ending racism is key to better science: a message from Nature’s guest editors This special issue is our ‘message in a bottle’ from the troubled ship of science. We urge readers to find it. Open it. Act on its contents.

Protestors attend a march for Black Lives Matter in Austin, Texas, in June 2020.





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