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(JAI: Will repeat again that when a movement wins battles that it has not even joined then that movement has momentum. But if that movement consists only of movement (protests, occupation, symbolic vandalism) without coming together to discuss, agree upon and disseminate to the larger community its ideas, its desires, in a word, its demands, then that movement will deteriorate. (Witness the 2011 "Occupy Wall Street" and its similars across the country. With all of the forces that these present efforts, spearheaded by the BLM movement, where is the movement into the neighborhoods and the recruitment of 'civilians' to our goals and thus a multiplication of the forces we would wield? We must go beyond (not to mean exclude) efforts to deconstruct the policing mechanism and onward towards calls for the radical transformation of society, i.e. the replacement of the capitalist system that is the fount from which all inequities spew therefrom.) In June, graffiti supporting calls for the Univeristy of Cambridge to remove a stained glass window memorializing statistician Ronald Fisher, a supporter of eugenics, appeared on a campus building. The university later removed the Fisher window. Amid protests against racism, scientists move to strip offensive names from journals, prizes, and more By Eli Cahan Jul. 2, 2020 , 6:05 PM https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/amid-protests-against-racism-scientists-move-strip-offensive-names-journals-prizes-and?utm_campaign=news_daily_2020-07-02&et_rid=401913599&et_cid=3387192 McGee, a herpetologist, studies the habitat and behavior of Yarrow’s spiny lizard, a reptile native to the southwestern United States. The University of Arizona graduate student and her colleagues regularly pack their things—boots, pens, notebooks, trail mix—and set off into the nearby Chiricahua Mountains. At their field site, they start an activity with a name that evokes a racist past: noosing. “Noosing” is a long-standing term used by herpetologists for catching lizards. But for McGee, a Black scientist, the term is unnerving, calling to mind horrific lynchings of Black people by white people in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. “Being the only Black person out in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of white people talking about noosing things is unsettling,” she says. McGee has urged her colleagues to change the parlance to “lassoing,” which she says also more accurately describes how herpetologists catch lizards with lengths of thread. McGee isn’t alone in reconsidering scientific language. Researchers are pushing to rid science of words and names they see as offensive or glorifying people who held racist views. This week alone, one scientific society is considering renaming a major journal that honors a renowned 19th century researcher who held racist views, and another is voting on changing the name of a trivia competition that canonizes a prominent eugenicist. And a prominent university has said it will remove from a campus building the name of a famous scientist who supported white supremacy. The moves come in the wake of last month’s decision to rename a major statistical prize—and in tandem with efforts to change the names of animals and plants that include ethnic slurs or honor researchers who were bigots. Unifying these initiatives is reinvigorated resistance to institutional racism. Kory Evans, a marine biologist at Rice University, says, “Dismantling white supremacism in science has taken on a new urgency” amid the broader reckoning ignited by the killing of George Floyd, the Black man suffocated by a white police officer in Minneapolis in May. The buildings, journals, prizes, and organism names that have come under scrutiny “lionize figures … who specifically took actions to undermine the humanity of people of color … [and] who laid the academic foundation for actual discrimination, sterilization, and genocide,” says Brandon Ogbunu, an evolutionary biologist at Brown University. The current movement isn’t the first to target scientists whose actions were judged unconscionable by subsequent generations. After the fall of Nazi Germany, apartheid in South Africa, and various communist nations, the names of scientists who supported oppressive policies were stripped from institutions and awards. And even before the recent demonstrations against systemic racism in the United States, many scientists had lobbied universities and science groups to stop honoring prominent researchers who had bigoted views. In 2018, for instance, years of activism prompted the University of Michigan (UM), Ann Arbor, to remove the name of Clarence Cook Little, an influential 20th century geneticist who supported eugenics, from a science building and a transit hub. Universities concerned about creating diverse and empowering atmospheres are wise to reconsider whose names adorn their buildings, says UM historian Alexandra Minna Stern, who has chronicled the evolution of eugenics in the United States. The names, she says, “make visible the values and priorities and beliefs of an institution.” This week, the University of Maine, Orono, followed UM’s lead, announcing <https://umaine.edu/president/2020/06/29/community-message-june-29/> on 29 June it would strip Little’s name from a building. “Little made an enduring positive contribution to science,” a university task force wrote <https://umaine.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/little-hall-task-force-report.pdf>. However, it added, “Major areas of his professional life violate the ideals that are central to the educational mission of the University of Maine and its commitment to the public good.” Drivers of the decision included Little’s high-profile support of eugenics and his work for the U.S. tobacco industry to dispute evidence linking smoking to cancer. (Continued at https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/amid-protests-against-racism-scientists-move-strip-offensive-names-journals-prizes-and?utm_campaign=news_daily_2020-07-02&et_rid=401913599&et_cid=3387192 _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
