After a thoughtless remark from a colleague, neuroscientist Devon Collins reflects on the way racism has impacted his life and science.

Devon Collins is a neuroscientist, podcaster, and educator from the Midwest. Currently a PhD candidate at the Rockefeller University, he studies how common genetic variation affects the brain’s responses to drugs and stress. He is one-third of the team behind Science Soapbox, a podcast about science and how it interacts with our personal and political lives. Passionate about making the future of STEM more diverse and inclusive, Devon also works as an educator in a STEM-focused after-school program for high school students from low-resource backgrounds. When he’s not doing science, talking science, or teaching science, you can find him baking, running, container gardening, or napping on his sofa with his cat and dog.

This story originally aired on Sept. 8, 2017 in an episode titled “Identification".”

Story Transcript

So I’m a scientist.  And as far back as I can remember, I've wanted to be one.  And for the past few years, especially with recent events like the March for Science and all the attacks that we in the scientific community feel, I’ve thought so much about why I became a scientist in the first place.  That naturally leads to what got me into it. 

It really comes down to the fact that I actually have three people to thank for my scientific career.  Like any good son, my mother, a shitty kindergartener, and Gene Roddenberry.  And if you're not down with sci-fi, Gene Roddenberry, I'll just let you know, is the creator of the original Star Trek series from the 1960s and most of the franchise that grew out of it.  I promise this will make sense at some point. 

So let me tell you how I figured all this out.  A couple of years ago, I was in a meeting with some colleagues and a professor at my school.  I mentor a lot of students during the spring and summer, and it was summer 2015.  I brought two of my students with me, Tiana, a brilliant black young woman from Long Island, and Sylvia, a Bronx native of Lebanese-Jewish descent. 

So we’re in this meeting.  I have them with me, and for some reason or another, I don't know but it was kind of that like crazy summer… it was actually literally, for a little bit of context, the day after Sandra Bland was found in her cell. 

So the subject, for some reason, of racism and sexism in the academy came up.  And as professors are wont to do, the professor who was leading this meeting started giving a lot of unasked-for advice.  A lot of it centered around dealing with discrimination in the academy.  She, in doing this, was recalling this former trainee of hers.  This black woman who was starting her career in the 1980s.  She said, “You know, the best advice I ever gave to her was, ‘Don’t worry.  Don’t worry about being black in science.  Just worry about being a woman in science and you'll be okay.’” 

That’s the shittiest advice I've ever heard.  That’s so terrible.  I was so incensed it was almost like I'd never been black before.  Like this professor, a white woman, was telling me, was telling my student, was telling other black scientists in the room that we had to check our race at the door.  That we could only understand ourselves and our careers through one lens -- an important lens, gender.  But only one.  We couldn’t bring our whole selves to the lab.  

That’s not true.  I know from experience that it’s not true.  At my home institution, in my program, I can count on one hand the number of black students other than myself.  And I've interacted with over ten generations of grad students.  I've met even fewer black postdocs.  Just last year, we got our first black full professor head of lab, in a hundred and sixteen years of the institution’s history. 

We’re funded -- black scientists are funded at abysmal rates compared to everybody else.  We are mistaken for janitors most of the time -- especially black women.  I carry, I have my ID in the most accessible place all the time, just in case.  Just in case somebody decides that I don't belong there. 

So with all this in mind, I was furious.  As much as I was furious for myself, I was furious for my students.  Because what were they supposed to get out of that?  They had never seen me like that.  We had gotten to know each other for over the course of a couple of weeks, and they could tell that something was up. 

So it was a struggle.  It was a big struggle to figure out exactly what I was going to say to them, how I was going to make sense of this shitty, shitty thing that had just been said to them.  And in that struggle, I actually was forced to think back to why I became a scientist in the first place. 

It led me to this point, actually the point when I first realized that I was black.  So it was kindergarten.  I was five years old and it was recess time.  For some reason, I don't know why, we were having an indoor recess period. 

My classroom had one of those play kitchen areas and so we did what little kids do.  We decided a couple of us were going to play house.  It got to the point where we were going to figure out who was going to be who, and one of my friends said, a girl said, “I’m gonna be the mom.”  And I thought, Cool, I’m going to be the dad.  I’m five but I’m a mature five so it will be great.  We’re going to do this. 

So I said to them like, “Hey, I’m gonna be the dad.  Is that cool?”  And without skipping a beat, one of the other boys said, “No, you can’t.” 

I was kind of taken aback because I had no idea like why he would say that.  Then I asked, I said, “Well, why can’t I?”  And he said, “Well, cause you're black.” 

It’s hard to remember exactly what was going through my mind at that time, but I do remember how I felt.  I was exposed and isolated and ashamed, even though I had done nothing wrong.  Then I looked around and it dawned on me like, Holy shit, I’m the only person in this group who’s not white.  And apparently, because of that, I can’t even pretend to be the dad in a make-believe family. 

By the time I got my wits back about me, everybody had started playing and I had to hold that with me.  I went back home later that day and I told my mom what happened and she had to explain to me.  She had to have the talk.  Not that “talk.” The talk that black parents have to have with their black kids. 

She told me, “Devon, sometimes what you imagine for yourself is not what the world imagines for you.  And sometimes what the world imagines for you is a lot less than what you deserve.  But you have to keep imagining because the world is wrong.” 

I can thank my mom for a lot of things, that talk especially, but honestly, the thing that… ugh, god, please, anybody who knows my mom, never tell her this.  But the best thing she ever did was to introduce me to Star Trek. 

I’m pretty sure that that night, like many other nights, my mom introduced me to Star Trek and she would let me stay up late sometimes.  We’d watch episodes of the original series until I would fall asleep or she would fall asleep sometimes.  It was amazing. 

Like many scientists before me, I was an indoor kid.  I was always a little bit more content sitting in my room playing with Legos, pretending to be like a prodigious inventor or a brilliant scientific mind who had just unlocked the keys to eradicating disease and starvation.  And I fell in love with Star Trek because it, among other things, is such an amazing shining beacon that can show us what we could be and how much potential for progress we have. 

See, Star Trek takes place in a world where poverty and disease and starvation haven't existed for generations, where people build starships that take them to the stars at unimaginable speeds, where we build medical devices that can heal injuries almost instantaneously.  And something, even as a kid, it prompted me to think like what are we going to have to do to make that a reality?  I want to see that.  I want to be a part of it.  I want to get us there. 

What is this?  Well, it’s science fiction.  So I guess I like science.  Science is cool.  Okay, cool.

But there was something else that was there.  Or I think actually a better way to put it is there's something else that wasn’t there.  See, Star Trek also took place in a world where racism and sexism and war were unheard of.  They were the exception and not the rule, except for a couple of really unfortunately designed costumes and some really crappy scripts.  These things were unheard of.

And it was a place where the brash, sexy Iowan Captain Kirk would adventure alongside the sardonic and cool and logical half-alien Spock.  Where George Takei would play Hikaru Sulu, who would pilot the Enterprise along with the cartoonishly Russian Pavel Chekov.  Where Scotty, the most aptly named Scotsman you could ever meet, would keep the ship running while the southern gentleman Leonard “Bones” McCoy would keep the crew running. 

And there's one name that I haven't gotten to yet but that’s Lieutenant Uhura played by the illustrious Nichelle Nichols.  And just for a little bit of context on why she's so important to me, Star Trek premiered in September of 1966 and that was, of course, in the middle of the American Civil Rights movement of that time, not that we’re really out of it. 

But here was this black woman, this black woman born on the fictional United States of Africa being beamed, pun intended, into living rooms across a very real, very segregated United States of America.  And she wasn’t a nanny or a cook or a maid.  She was a bridge officer on the flagship of an interstellar defense force and exploration force.  She was an engineer, she was a scientist, she was an expert on communications and linguistics.  And she would save the lives of her crewmates and of humanity and of the galaxy.  The fate of the day would rest on her shoulders. 

On some of the extra-special nights, my mother would let me stay up even later and I got to watch LeVar Burton in the first Star Trek spinoff series, The Next Generation.  You might know LeVar Burton from Reading Rainbow.  He played a man named Geordi La Forge, who was the chief engineer on a new Starship Enterprise with a new generation of explorers. 

And even as a kid, it wasn’t lost on me that LeVar Burton, the man who played the enslaved Kunta Kinte in the Roots miniseries of the seventies was the same man who was in charge of the warp engine, which is the beating heart of the Enterprise.  It was in one person of almost poetic juxtaposition of where black folks like me had been and where we could be. 

So fast-forward to now.  I still watch old episodes of Star Trek albeit on Netflix instead of on like a local FOX affiliate or whatever I was watching before.  I made a promise to myself when I was a kid, and I kept that promise.  I became a scientist.  I’m trying to save the world by studying opioid addiction and teaching science to kids instead of, you know, saving the galaxy. 

But most of my students are brown like me.  A lot of them are brown women like Lieutenant Uhura.  A lot of them want to… no, all of them see themselves in a world that needs to be made better.  And they want to be scientists.  They want to use their science to make the world better. 

Which brings me back to that meeting.  So, still fuming, I took Tiana and Sylvia back to my lab bench and I told them, “Look, whenever somebody tells you that you can’t bring your whole self to this, to science, that person is lying to you.  If they ever say that you have to ignore one part of yourself in order to come to work, then they don’t know what they're talking about.” 

So we spent the rest of the day talking about identity and gender and science and discrimination.  I learned a lot about my students, but they also led me to realize something about myself.  Tiana told me that she wanted to work with me, me in particular, because she was a young black woman looking for a career in science. And she knew that science has a very real, very terrible gender problem, but she had no idea how those things were going to come together, how her race was going to come together with her gender to make her life in science.  And she was looking to me for answers on how to be a black person in academia. 

That’s an awesome, awesome responsibility.  See, when I was a kid in kindergarten, I learned that I wasn’t even safe from racism in my imagination.  I had to look to fictional heroes to figure out what I could be and come up with the options from my own life.  As a teacher, I get to be that real.  I get to be in the flesh in front of somebody actually living out their dreams, living out the best things that they could imagine for themselves.  I could be somebody’s Geordi.  I could be somebody‘s Uhura.  Only, right here, in front of them and not on TV.  I can be a part of somebody’s yet unrealized future.

Thank you.