Good Life Project - Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein | All Things Being Equal, Nothing Ever Is

Episode Date: November 22, 2021

One of the leading physicists of her generation, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a Professor of Physics and Core Faculty Member in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She���s also one of fewer than a hundred Black American women to earn a Ph.D. from a department of physics. Born in East Los Angeles, a devout Dodgers fan, she’s a citizen of both the United States and Barbados and a descendant of Afro-Caribbean and Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants. Chanda decided to become a theoretical physicist at the age of 10, after an experience, which we dive into, lit a fire of curiosity and possibility. Her vision of the cosmos is vibrant, buoyantly non-traditional, and grounded in Black feminist traditions. A powerful voice in her field, Chanda urges us to recognize how science, like most fields, is far from an equal playing field, with racism, sexism, and other dehumanizing systems playing a role not only in who participates in the field but also in the essential nature of the work and the potential discoveries and insights it yields. She lays out a bold new approach to science and society that begins with the belief that we all have a fundamental right to know and love the night sky. In her groundbreaking new book, The Disordered Cosmos, Chanda shares her love for physics, from the Standard Model of Particle Physics and what lies beyond it, to the physics of melanin in skin, to the latest theories of dark matter — all with a new spin informed by history, politics, and the wisdom of Star Trek. We explore her personal journey and many of these ideas in today’s conversation.You can find Chanda at: Website | InstagramIf you LOVED this episode:You’ll also love the conversations we had with Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor about the science of the brain.My new book Sparked.-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I do think that this is all part of the cosmological story. And I also think dreams deferred are part of the cosmological story. But I hope that there will be a generation for whom dreams deferred is something that they study, not something that they live. So when you think of physics, do you think about something that will change your world, that draws you in, that you're just juicily excited to dive into? Well, that was the experience of Dr. Chanda Prescott Weinstein at the age of 10 when she was introduced to this world in a way that she never expected.

In fact, she kind of fought when her mom said, we need to go do this thing. And yet it lit a fire of curiosity and discovery that has never left her. Dr. Chanda Prescott Weinstein is a professor of physics and core faculty member in women's and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. She's also one of fewer than a hundred black American women to earn a PhD from a department of physics. Born in East LA, a devout Dodgers fan, she's a citizen of both the United States and Barbados and a descendant of Afro-Caribbean and Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants. And she decided to become a theoretical physicist at such a young age. We dive into this story.

Her vision of the cosmos is vibrant, buoyantly non-traditional, and grounded in Black feminist traditions. Emerging as a powerful voice in her field, Chanda really urges us to recognize how science, like most fields, is far from an equal playing field with racism, sexism, and other dehumanizing systems playing a role not only in who participates in the field, but in the essential nature of the work and the potential discoveries and insights that it yields, she lays out a bold new approach to science and society that begins with the belief that we all have a fundamental right to know and love the night sky. In her groundbreaking new book,

The Disordered Cosmos, Chanda shares her love for physics from the standard model of particle physics and what lies beyond to the physics of melanin in the skin from the standard model of particle physics and what lies beyond to the physics of melanin in the skin to the latest theories of dark matter, all with a new spin informed by history, politics, and even the wisdom of Star Trek. We explore her personal journey and many of these ideas in today's conversation. So excited to share it with you. And a quick note before we dive in. So at the end of every episode, I don't know if you've ever heard this, but we actually recommend a similar episode. So if you love this episode, at the end, we're going to share another one that we're pretty sure

you're going to love too. So be sure to listen for that. Okay. On to today's conversation. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. Play ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations,

iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. I think kind of a fun starting point is you were raised in what you describe as raised largely by a single mom. Both parents also really devote to causes.

Activism was really, it sounds like a part of the ethos of your family. I'm curious what your experience was of that at a really young age. It's interesting. There was a tweet that was circulating. I guess like CBS asked the question, how early is too early to teach kids about race or how old should kids be when they learn about race? And a lot of black people were responding and saying,

well, I had to learn in preschool because such and such incident happened and that kind of thing. And I was reading through people's responses and I was trying to figure out if I could remember a time when I wasn't aware of race. And I don't remember a time when I wasn't aware of race and I wasn't aware of gender and I wasn't aware of these things. And so I think maybe that's a good way to characterize what it was like, which was that

I was steeped in kind of having an understanding about these things pretty much immediately from the moment I was conscious. And I think also like applying the analyses I was hearing, like I remember my preschool, which was like called the People's Preschool of Echo Park or something like that. So not conservative leaning. I remember one year for Christmas, like all of the kids got like a He-Man and She-Ra toy and all of the boys got He-Mans and all of the girls got She-Ra. And I was really upset because I wanted to be like the boys. And I think at that point, I must have been like three or four, but I already knew, not

just like I was having an internal reaction, but I already knew from listening to my parents talk that like, this was actually inappropriate. Like, I remember doing that analysis and being like, well, I am, according to like what mom says, this isn't right. Yeah. I mean, do you have a sense for the conversation in your house in particular being different than other kids your age? No, I had like no sense that people were having like, and I don't even think I fully understood

that until I went to college. Like at all. I mean, I understood that not everybody's parents shared the same political views as mine, but I thought everybody was like, you know, watching what was at the time, the McNeil-Lehrer news hour and like having like vigorous discussion and everybody's household had like a really strong opinion about the presidential primary. And I also, what's interesting, right, is that my mom also wasn't a U.S. citizen until I was almost graduating from high school. And so it was completely disconnected from we have to go out to vote.

Like I never went with any parent and went into the voting booth and had the experience of seeing a ballot. Like it wasn't around that at all. And in hindsight, that's probably actually the political experience that a lot of other people were having was their sense of, this is politics, was going and voting with their parents or having their parents talking about the importance of voting. But in the household I was raised in, nobody had the right to vote. And so that wasn't the center of the conversation. Yeah. So it was really, it sounds like much more just issue-based, like these are things that are important about us, about the community, about life, about values and what matters. But also it sounds like a part of that is when you find

something important, it's also important to say something about it, to not be quiet. Yeah. I don't think I've ever seen my mom back down from like, if something's not right, Margaret Prescott is going to say something about it. And so I think that people are often like very much, they think that I'm very much her child. The day that the US went to war in Iraq, I guess the second time in my lifetime I ended up speaking at the rally in Boston and I was so nervous that I like started cussing a lot like I was like I'm really fucking mad that we all have to be here fuck this and afterwards someone came up to me and was like are you Sam Weinstein's daughter? Because you sound and look like him. And like all of the cussing was kind of like,

I had flagged myself as like probably between the last name I had like flagged myself. So I think in both of those ways, like of like being very vocal about things and passionate and passionately vocal about things. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, but also how powerful also as a kid, right? To know that, you know, you can and should care about particular things and that you can and should actually be forward facing about them and have a voice and be strong in them when so often like and be strong in them. When so often like the opposite message is given, it's just kind of like, fit in, be quiet, don't cause any issues and like get by.

And depending who you are, also a lot of that may be rooted in the desire literally for safety, for physical, avoiding physical harm. But there was something about your family ethos that said, we need to kind of go the opposite direction. Yeah. I mean, I think in hindsight, you know, I think my mom was careful in a lot of ways, but also took a lot of risks as someone who was in the United States on a green card, which I think that we all now have a better awareness of the fact that it's risky to be outspoken, even when you have citizenship, but particularly when you don't have citizenship. And I think that I didn't really appreciate growing up that that was part of it, is that there was risk involved and that she was making

that decision. And there was risk involved in other ways, right? At various points, she was being threatened. The police, LAPD didn't like her that. So there were there were a lot of ways where it really did put her at risk. And I think today she and I have these conversations where we're both kind of like, OK, well, you know, you that advice. But you set like a really terrible example. And now the pattern is established. I do think that there's a flip side to it. And I think children, what we would call, I guess, movement babies, actually end up in a lot of ways sacrificing pieces of their childhood to the movement. And I think that that's not something that is talked about enough, really. You know, I grew up with a political analysis. And I think it's been very valuable for me to have that analysis. But it also

means that you never have a moment where you're just kind of looking at the world through just like naive children's eyes. And it also shaped like the relationship that I had with my teachers. My teachers went on strike when I was in, I guess, like second grade, first grade. Yeah, I think it was second grade. And I went up to the substitute and said, why are you scabbing? Because my dad is a labor organizer and I knew if you were working, that meant you had crossed the picket line. I had spent enough time on picket lines by the age of six or seven that I understood crossing a picket line. And I wasn't particularly trying to pressure her, but at various points, I was trying to understand why people were making these different value choices than the ones that I understood to be the correct values.

And so I really just wanted to know, why is this person scabbing on the strike? At the same time, I had been put on the bus to go to school. So like, I think like, you know, somebody was expecting someone to be there on the other end to receive me. Similarly, in third grade, and this is a story that I tell in my book, in the Disordered Cosmos in the introduction, I at some point asked my teacher if she was being racist because she had done something that looked racist to me. Like I looked at the pattern and I was like, this looks racist. And I, I was kind of proud of myself for correctly identifying the pattern, but I wanted to verify

that I had correctly identified it and just asked her and she was livid and threw me out of the classroom. Right. So on the one hand, it's like shaping my experience with my teachers. And, and on the other hand, right, there were other students who weren't like super high performers who weren't labeled like highly gifted, like I was, who were having negative experiences with the teachers is by virtue of like walking into the classroom, right? And so I don't want to be like, woe is me. It's just kind of like, it's a different, it's a different relationship. And so there's less rose colored time, I guess. Yeah. I mean, what's so interesting about that story also is, and tell me if actually this is right

from the outside looking in it also, there's a lot of foreshadowing in terms of like what you would step into in your career, because it wasn't just like, I'm going to call my teacher out. You were saying, I'm identifying a pattern here. Yeah. Like I'm looking, I'm scanning at like what's happening with this experience. Like check saying, I'm identifying a pattern here. I'm scanning at what's happening with this experience, check, check, check, check, check. And part of it is, yes, there's a sense of social justice rooted in you even at the earliest age. But part of it is

also it's like the scientist's point of inquiry, like, did I get this right? Yeah. I am a very direct person. And I think some of that is just like, that's the way that my brain works. And some of that is probably cultural. Particularly, I don't know, I think Ashkenazi Jews are known for being kind of direct. And so in a lot of ways, I think that my style of approaching things violates WASP rules. Like, I don't think about like, how can I make this polite and pleasant? I'm just like, how can I make this polite and pleasant? I'm just like, how can I be clear and get the information I need to make sure people have the information that they need? In my opinion, which like not everybody agrees that that was information that they needed or that I needed to have. Right. So I think in a lot of ways I was primed because

I think that scientists are also people who are very directed in terms of like what kinds of information we want and information that we're trying to gather. But yeah, that was a big piece of it. And it's easy, of course, in hindsight to say, but like in hindsight, that story looks like exactly like I was approaching it like a tiny little scientist. I was like, I see pattern. Let me make sure I, let me verify that I've correctly identified the pattern. And on the other hand, maybe like sort of the stereotype of like the scientist who doesn't understand the emotional context of it at all. My teacher clearly thought like I was going for the jugular. And I mean, in some sense I was because of course my next step was if she says,

yes, I'm going to have to tell her that that's wrong. Like I'm going to have to tell her that racism is bad. But I didn't go in assuming that she was going to say yes. And she actually never answered the question. I think that this is like another piece of it, which is that she doesn't take the time to say, actually, no, that's not what happened. And what happened was X, Y, and Z, which in hindsight, I think the answer was that she told me yes, by throwing me out of the classroom. Yeah, that was your answer right there. kids game to mastering a strength program they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals no pressure to be who you're not just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are

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Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. As you're sort of getting a little bit older, I know there's a moment where you're about 10 years old where your mom, as you just described, it kind of drags you to see a movie that you had no interest in seeing by some guy named Stephen Hawkins, a brief history in time. And up until that point, like physics, empirical science, this was not sort of like a thing for you.

But there was something about that moment, like a switch got flipped in you. Yeah, I actually have like very visceral memories of me like making snide comments, like the whole way in the car. I think maybe because like I was so awestruck on the other end that I just like remembered that whole morning. Right. So at that point, I had briefly been part of a science elective. I was in fifth grade. I was attending a performing and visual arts school. So very much oriented. Like I was already I was already playing flute at school. I was also in a program for poor kids on Saturdays where I'd been playing piano for years. I had been doing

modern and folk dance for years at school. So I was very much like steeped in the arts. I was also just very excited about math and everybody knew that, but there hadn't really been much opportunity. And then that year I had briefly been put in a class where we were doing what was called like physical science, where we were learning things about like, how does a plane stay in the air? So about like the idea of pressure and pressure above the wing and pressure below the wing and the pressure being a blow being higher. And so the plane stays in the air and that sort of thing. And I was really into it. I was also really into the idea of photosynthesis, which I think of as a quantum phenomenon because it's basically like plants collecting photons,

right? And so I think all of that is actually why my mom took me to see the Errol Morris documentary, A Brief History of Time, about Stephen Hawking, because everything that I was doing and clinging to was like, I like the way the physical, I was interested in the physical world. I think that that, at that point, had become clear. And I think that my mom was looking for ways to kind of expose me to ideas in a way that was affordable for us. And so I think it's like worth saying that we went to a matinee. She had to drive us from like the east side to the west side. So for people who live in LA, it was at the Lemley Theater on the west side. And all she could afford was a matinee, particularly after all of the gas money.

And so this was like actually kind of a big expedition for her. The other thing is, is that my mom, she's like, um, she's a total fashionista. Like, and I mean this in like the, the clothing sense. Like I think my mom just like went through a big move and had to give a lot of her clothing away. And I think it was a very big emotional trauma for her, but she was always also very fashion forward in her interest. Like she read Fritjof Capra is the Tao of physics, which I realize like a lot of physicists don't love or whatever. But she had a sense that theoretical physics was kind of interesting and that physics was kind of interesting.

And so I do think that she was interested in seeing the documentary herself as well. But I think a big piece of it was just trying to get me an opportunity to see the world in a way that maybe I wouldn't get exposed to at school. Yeah. Walking out of that experience for you, did you know that something was really different? Yes. I think, again, I was precocious in a lot of ways, and that's not a comment about my intellect or anything like that. I think that's a function of my family. I think to get along in my family, you have to be kind of precocious. You either are really loud or really quiet. Those are your two ways of being in the family.

I already knew at that point that I had to have a job. I had to have a career. I had a sense of that. I had a sense that nobody was going to take care of me, that there was no big inheritance or whatever. And so I was already kind of surveying things. And I think going into that documentary, I kind of half-heartedly was interested in becoming a biologist because I had

recently found out that my grandfather, who I was very attached to, had, and they hadn't told me this when I was six, when he died, that he had died of cancer. And so I had like kind of my brief, I think a lot of kids go through this moment of, I'm going to become, I'm going to cure cancer. And I came out and I was like, I'm doing that. That was it. Like I knew. And I knew that I knew and I can even, I remember the moment when it dawned on me in the documentary, like I can do this.

This is my life now. And so like fight number one is I came out of the movie theater, like begging my mom for a copy of Stephen Hawking's book. I was like, I have to have this book. I need to know more. And my mom was like, no, I don't think that's a good idea. It's for adults. You won't understand it. And then you'll be really frustrated. And I was like, no, but I really have to have it. And then probably by the time I got home, I had forgotten. But clearly my mom actually hadn't because my uncle Peter, her older brother, bought it for me for my 11th birthday that year. And so at that point,

I was so excited by the book. I didn't understand it, but I was okay with that because I knew that I was going to have to go on a journey to understand it and that I had committed my life to that journey. And so it was fine. I had the rest of my life to figure the book out. I mean, you say it in such a matter of fact way, like this is just what happens. Like the 10-year-old kid discovers this thing and knew in the blink of an eye, something happened that this was going to be my life. And yet that is so not the experience of the typical person. It's like, let alone in their twenties, thirties, forties, you know? So like to have this drop into your life when you're 10, 11 years old is extraordinary in so many different ways, but not the least of which is

you then get to spend, you know, from that moment on deepening into this thing in so many different ways, rather than spending the next, you know, season or two or three of your life trying to figure out what that thing is. And then at that point, if you happen to do it, deepen into it, which is really extraordinary. You know, in hindsight, I think about it and I think about the precarity of the academic trajectory. And fewer, I think at this point, than 10% of people with PhDs in physics in the United States actually go on to become faculty in physics. And this is especially true now. So back then, this was like 1992, 1993,

the academy looked very different. There was a lot more stability. The majority of faculty were tenure track. And so there were like these jobs that you could have like a career. Today, the majority of American faculty are contingent faculty. So they don't have jobs that are guaranteed from semester to semester. And it's basically like a seasonal faculty. It's a seasonal job now in a lot of ways that doesn't pay a living wage. And only 25% of us are actually in these tenure track positions. I'm one of those people. In a lot of ways,

I have threaded a needle with a very small hole because I believed the entire time. In some sense, I stuck with it. I should say this isn't why it all happened, but I stuck with it because I had this belief the entire time that this was the place I was going to arrive. In a lot of ways, I think it was easier on me when I was in high school because I wasn't going through all that like, what's my major going to be? I didn't have that drama when I was in college, which was useful because at Harvard, when I was there, we had to pick our major at the end of our first year, right? You didn't get like two years of exploration and all of that. The flip side was when I became a postdoctoral fellow and I was really aware of

the probabilities of succeeding in getting into a faculty position, I think I took it harder than someone who hadn't, you know, been on the same path since they were 10. And so like towards the end of my search for a faculty position, I was that in a, in a really bad mental place where I was like sitting down on the floor and crying in the middle of the day. And my spouse had to kind of pick me up and be like, I'm like, at least sit on the couch and watch TV. Don't just sit on the floor and cry. So I think, you know, that's the ugly side of it is that you become really attached to this thing as a child. And you think, well, because I'm interested in this, surely someone will make an opportunity for me to do it. And then you actually live in this capitalist world where

resources are distributed in the way that they are. And that's not exactly how it works. Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting too, right? Because so in the early days, when you start to deepen into this and tell me if they have this right, you know, like there's not a whole lot of classes for you to take in high school. So you literally start to sort of find and create a lot of what you're doing is starting to figure out how to teach yourself. A lot of the things you really want to learn, then you get to, you end up in Harvard and then you're doing your, your, your master's and your PhD. And then when you get to that place, it's almost like in the early days, you have this sense of, I can figure out.

If it's not available to me, if it's not sort of like just being offered up, I'll figure out how to make it happen. And every signal to you up until that point was, might not have been easy. You might have had to endure a lot, but you were able to do it. And it sounds like that one moment was the moment where there was for the first time it dropped into this sort of like expectation that even if it's not easily available to me, I can make it happen. You couldn't. And that was it almost like it violated the ethos that had driven everything up until that point. I definitely think there was an element of this, like, so people aren't

going to see me, but I was like nodding really big for a lot of that. Like, absolutely. You know, my high school, the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, go mighty unicorns. I'm a proud alum of Laces. It's also, it's a public magnet school. It's a well-resourced magnet school. And so I was very lucky to be able to attend it in a lot of ways, but it's still Los Angeles Unified School District, which is under-resourced broadly across the board. The first calculus class that I took had over 40 students in it. And my teacher, Mr. Buckner, who was brilliant and rest in peace, Mr. Buckner, he was an amazing person, taught Socratic method. And that doesn't work in a classroom of 40 people in the end. And so we actually hadn't finished most of the material by the time we got a few weeks out from the AP exam.

And I basically had to teach myself the second half of the class, right? So this is an example of exactly what you're talking about. And it was really something where I was just like, mom, I can't go to school for the next two weeks because I have to stay in my room and teach myself this material. And mom believed me. And so that's what I did. And I got a four out of five on the exam, right? And so that's good enough. There's no calculus class beyond that at my school. And at that point, that was 10th grade. So halfway through high school, I've already run out of math classes. So I'm like, okay, I'm doing the rest of it independent study. The same thing happens with AP physics. I do an independent study. I think the first time we all run into that moment of here's something that's really out

of our hands is applying to college, right? But I had excelled so much that for me, it wasn't a question of whether I would go to college. It was a question of whether I would get into Harvard or not. And I realize that sounds really arrogant, but that was really like I had busted ass, right? So like I knew I was going to go somewhere. But even then I get into Harvard, I get a not good financial aid package because, well, actually Harvard won't give me a financial aid initially because one of my parents won't do the non-custodial parent form and has made it clear that there will

be no contributions for me going to college from that side. And so my mom basically has to beg the financial aid office to go around their normal way of doing things and not punish me for decisions that are being made by somebody else. Right. And so I'm watching my mom do this. So just as you're describing at each thing, it's just like, this is a problem to be solved. We tackle it, we push through it. And it is definitely the case that as I'm going further ahead in my academic career, I should, before I go forward, I should actually just back up and say that when I got to Harvard, I campaigned for that policy to be changed. Because it was negatively impacting queer students who got disowned by their parents, right? And so actually, you can go back, there was a whole spread about me in the Boston Globe, giving Harvard a hard time about it. So again, not just changing it for

ourselves, but also seeing that this is like a structural problem that needs to be addressed more widely. But then, you know, applying to graduate school and realizing that there are actually people who could just be like, no, you there's no spot for you. We are not making room for you. And that just gets worse as you go further ahead. And at some point, it's actually there's there's no hustling. There's zero hustling. So I think that's like the short version is, is that at some point you can't hustle And you really are at the mercy of, is there a job open?

Are people willing to give you an opportunity? Is this person willing to write you a good letter? Are they not having a life crisis so that they can write you a letter and all of these things? And it was completely terrifying to have it completely out of my hands. Yeah. And I mean, I know you write about this, I guess. And I wasn't aware of this phenomenon that a fairly high percentage of people with PhDs in physics actually end up literally

not being able to stay in academics, even if that's the path that they want to follow, because there's just no room. So they're sort of like going out into the world and trying to find alternatives. For you, you end up following an interesting path. You do end up, as we're having this conversation, you are in the world of academia. So you've navigated into this space where you're teaching, you're deep into this world. You're a professor at the University of New Hampshire, both physics and astronomy, and also focusing on women and gender studies. And I know this number changes around 51st, 52nd black American woman to get a PhD in

physics, I guess, depending on sort of like how that's viewed. We can talk about that. I'm very passionate about it. I'm curious because I've seen that number like sort of like fluctuate all over the place. Yeah. So there's a list which I encourage everyone to check out on a website called African American Women in Physics. The organization is African American Women in Physics, Inc. So it started as a list. Dr. Jamie Valentine Miller, when she was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University.

And I think she was the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics from Johns Hopkins University. And I think she was the first black woman to earn a PhD in physics from Johns Hopkins University. She used to just maintain a list of black women who had PhDs in physics that she knew about. And so this list has become kind of a focal point of like understanding what is this population. And so I just want to kind of like situate in context for people. So every year in the United States, about 2000 PhDs are granted in physics, plus or minus like 100 or so, but around 2000. And in all of US history, only about 100 have gone to black women. And so the first one was in 1972.

And so this is fairly, it's fairly recent phenomenon, right? It's like last 50 years, basically, black women have finally started earning PhDs from in departments of physics, right? So where is some of the complexity around the list comes in is, is it from a department of physics? Is it from a department of astronomy? Are they someone who was technically in a material science department, but they are doing what is essentially physics? In my case, I am an African-American woman, but my PhD is from the University of Waterloo in Canada. If you add Canada into those numbers, they don't really change very much because Canada is doing an abysmal job of stewarding Black women through degrees in physics at all levels. So the reason that the

numbers fluctuate is it really depends on who you're counting. But if we're talking about just from a department of physics, I was somewhere in the low to mid-50s of Black American women to earn a PhD from a department of physics. The other thing is if you add in Black women from outside of North America, the numbers grow a little bit. And they've been growing a lot more recently because South Africa is finally producing black women PhDs and not just white PhDs in physics. And that's really a recent change because apartheid only recently ended, right? So the numbers are constantly fluctuating and there are strong feelings about how people should be counted on the list, right? So if we add biophysics in, then the numbers actually change a lot

because biophysics, so I'm going to show my bias here. Biophysics is in a lot of ways, a completely different discipline. Like the people working in biophysics often have not gone through a physics program at any stage of their education. And so the patterns of biophysics tend to follow the patterns of biology more than the patterns of physics. So that's kind of like the nuances around the numbers. Yeah. So now I try to be more specific and say that I'm one of the first 100 from a department of physics. Right. And it also, you know, so part of looking at that is how do we actually define like, what is physics and what is not physics? Part of it is also how do we identify race? Part of it is also how we identify gender, you know? And so all these questions now are going to go into not only that, but also the broader field. So if we look at the way that we identify each one of those, it's like if you change

any one of those a little bit, it's probably going to completely change the numbers that we look at. But I think the bigger question that comes to mind is no matter how much we sort of slide the ruler on any one of those identifiers, it's still abysmally low. Yes. You know, it is still horrendous representation. And that begs the question, what's going on? What's underneath that?

Yeah, I think this is an interesting week to kind of think about this question in particular, because, you know, the LA Times had an article yesterday or the day before about changes to the way that math is being taught in California, right? So they're trying to de-emphasize calculus at the high school level. And the argument is that students from under-resourced and de-resourced communities will perform better in math if they don't have to do calculus. And, you know, as a professional physicist who loved calculus, I am an, and a black person from a de-resourced community. I grew up in East LA, which is why I still read the LA times, even though I live all the way in New Hampshire now. I think, you know,

the big point is that we still live in a society that's structurally white supremacist, that there's a reason I'm talking about de-resourced communities, right? I was very, very lucky that my mom was such a good hustler and worked it out. And also, you know, I think put herself in financial situations that caused enormous amounts of stress so that I could continue even going to the school that I was going to, right? So I was on a school bus three hours a day, which meant I couldn't work a job in high school, which is how a lot of low-income kids help out with their family once they're old enough to be able to do that.

So think about, can I focus on a calculus class if I'm juggling all of these other things at the same time? So I think for me, that's one of the pieces of it. But the other thing is, is that we know from looking at the data that, and this is especially true in mathematics and the physical sciences. I was looking at like just a horribly embarrassing for us plot the other day. Students come in with a high interest in majoring in STEM fields. And by the end of their first year of college, they're switching to something else. So something's happening in those first year classes that is saying, this isn't the subject for you.

You're not welcome here. The subject's not fun. It's not good for your future. And the figure that I was looking at on Wednesday particularly showed that people who come in with an interest in mathematics and physical science, not only leave mathematics and physical science, but they leave science altogether more than people who start out with an interest in other STEM fields. So basically the thing that we excel at is scaring the crap out of people and chasing them off, which is the opposite of what we want to be doing. And I think all of those things are going to be heightened for people as you were describing that back to my freshman year in college.

So like, and I'm, you know, like white middle-class guy stepping into a state university in New York, taking a 500 person intro to bio class. And the word on that class was before you even signed up, this is a quote weed out class, you know, and it was entirely designed to just terrify anyone who wasn't like a hundred percent committed to making this their life out of that class. You know, like the, it was like almost like the, the subtext was, you know, the greatest reward happens by having the greatest number of people drop before the end of the class. You're like, that's what you're gunning for in, in the metrics.

And then you take like, like you described, then you take a kid who's showing up with sort of like multiple marginalizations and stepping into that they all have to take as first years that was most hated, right? And so at MIT, part of the curriculum is the students are required to take intro to physics, intro to chemistry, intro to biology. They're supposed to get a broad science education. So 801, the intro to physics class was absolutely the most hated course on campus out of like, you know, a broad curriculum. And, you know, the interesting thing about that kind of weed out philosophy, which is like, of course, I think probably everybody still hears that. Like I certainly heard classes as weed out classes is that now as faculty, I understand like how bad that is economically. It's actually bad for a department economically because the way that university finance works

is that funding for your department is partly tied to what enrollment numbers are. So if you're scaring people away, you're literally setting money on fire. Like you're just like, let's have a bonfire with all the money that we could have gotten from the students that we owe. We chase them off. And I guess it's possible that like back then those things weren't so tethered together. And so maybe there was like less incentive to care about that. But today we want our students to stay in our classes in part because like our department's viability depends on students showing up. And so for us, at a lot of universities,

the physics department is a service department to engineering and to biology, because all of the pre-meds have to take a physics class in order to get into med school, and the engineering students all need an introduction to physics. So, you know, there's an element of it also that just like completely lacks humility. But like, it's not just that the students need you as the instructor, you as the instructor need students. Yeah, even at the end of the day, it's like an economic decision. Right. It's certainly that's a part of it. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

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Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is?

You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. And for you, you're out in the world. You're working in this space. And you're one of those people who's actually not the sort of contract worker. You're a professor. You're on a tenure track. And yet still the culture of this sort of like ecosystem in which you operate is not hospitable a lot of the time. You write, I'm going to read your words back to you. I don't fit into the

dominant astrophysics culture. And this has really sucked a lot of the fun out of physics for me. People like me are not particularly welcome in particle theory. There are times when I felt the astrophysics community was actively ruining the stars for me because of its unwillingness to detach from dehumanizing ways of making science happy. Yeah. I don't know if this is going to sound terrible, but you're the second person to read that portion to me this week. So I guess it struck a chord with people. It's striking a nerve because it's like it's powerful. Yeah. So that comes from a chapter in the book called Let Astrophysics Be the Dream It Used to Be.

And that chapter is based on a blog entry that I wrote in like two hours in a hotel room in Manhattan one night. Which I think like one of the reasons that I share that story is that I think it's worth giving people like the context of like that really came from like a deep, like say it with your gut kind of place of, you know, I talked earlier about being in that space of like sitting on the floor and crying. And that blog entry was written while I was in, I was going through that, that experience of struggling to get jobs, seeing that I was not, you know, there are one or two people who are almost always white men. Sometimes they're white women. They're very rarely people of color. If they are people of color, they're Asian. But every year there's like one or two people who like get like five of the offers, even though they can only take one. Right. And so you're just kind of waiting for that person to say no so that you can see who the next person on the list is and that kind of thing.

It's brutal psychologically. So that that was a piece of it is just knowing, you know what, you have not been embraced. You get to watch one other person walk around with the crown on and be like constantly embraced. And to know that one of the reasons that you haven't been embraced is because of things that you've struggled with that are related to your identities. Or people felt uncomfortable because you challenged them on something. I mean, now I'm like a lot more conscious of when I'm accusing someone of being a racist, right? Like I know.

But I think that also, you know, just going back to like my communication style, that people often think that I'm being like passive aggressive with them or that they have to read between the lines with me. And usually I'm just saying the thing that I mean, right? And so this is an example of where those cultural differences come in is that like sometimes you're literally almost speaking a different language and people think that the only language that should be spoken is the one that seems most natural to them. And they're not willing to adjust to understand, no, this is how someone like me communicates,

right? This is how back home, this is how we talk. This is how we do things. So it's stuff like that. It's also little things like wearing hoop earrings to work and having the other postdocs or graduate students come up to me and be like, those are huge. Can I put my fist through them? And it's like, nobody. It's just, there's an element of when they think that my culturally embedded like jewelry choices are kind of funny. So there's the like being laughed

at element of it. There's the basic element of being reminded you are not of these people. These people are not of your people. There's this like the little like every day you don't belong. There's the going to on that same trip where I had written the blog entry that day I had gone to give a talk at an Ivy League institution. People can put the geography together. And I was there to talk science. And an old white man sits down next to me and says, so Weinstein, which one of the parents is the Jew? And that's not happening to the white Jews, right? That's not happening to the white Jews. Or another example is, you know, a bunch of postdocs are standing around with a visiting professor and the professor is like asking everyone, what do they work on? And they get to me and they're like, Chanda,

I had an Indian postdoc once. At no point does the guy ask me like what my research is on. So there are all these like, I think they're all like things that people are like, oh yeah, but that's like, it sucks. But like, it's like one thing, but like, what if that's like your every fucking day? And you, because you're on this hunt for a faculty position, you can't tell anybody how it makes you feel because these people are all in a position to completely ruin your life if they don't like you. Yeah. I mean, it is the, it's like you take the dominant culture sort of like in mainstream

society, and then you distill it into this smaller ecosystem where it becomes amplified in every level. And it's not just, it's about race, but it's also about the overlay between race and what happens in the sort of like altered universe of academia. And then even more narrowly, what happens in this very particular domain of academia and the culture that exists there. And so you have like these multiple overlays of a culture that has been baked for generations. And if you want to be one of those few people- I like that. It's just like baked. It's like almost like it's like caked in, like you left it out and it should have been soaking, but you just let it sit by the sink and like grow mold. Right. It's like the dose should still be rising. Maybe it still needs a little something else. Right. Yeah. But it's like fully baked. And now when you tie to that, like you've devoted so much of your life to the pursuit of this thing and the economic and the, and the career opportunities and the opportunity to actually do this thing that you've been passionate about since you were 10 years old

is tied to you sort of like performing compliance within that overlay of culture. I mean, that has got to be such a brutal experience to step into on an everyday basis. Yes. I think you said it better than I did. Yes, I mean, I can say with full confidence that I wouldn't be where I am now if I hadn't had a lot of support in that moment, in that particular time period. And I think it's valuable and useful to articulate what support means in that moment was like financial. I had financial stability. I had a spouse who was making like more than twice what I was at one point and was able, it was a situation where I didn't have to worry about like, am I at some point going to not be able to afford this? I was able to get my student loans paid off really quickly, which usually doesn't happen.

So the amount that I owe isn't growing. And so that actually took out like a huge piece of the equation of like, can I stomach this? How long can I stay in this race? I think that that's like a really important piece of it. And then I literally had someone picking me up off the floor. And so like, what do you do? Particularly because as academics, we're often expected to move just wherever we get the job. What if you're like in the middle of nowhere and you don't know anybody? Who picks

you up off the floor then, right? So it's so dependent on us having access to fiscal and social capital that not everybody has access to, to survive it and get through it. And, you know, I should be clear, like I'm a light skinned black woman, that all of this would only have been turned up if I had been darker, if my hair was even curlier than it is. And, you know, trying to maintain an awareness of that while also kind of feeling the feelings. It's a lot. Yeah. I would have to imagine. And I mean, even once you step into it and you start to work in the field, there's a different set of things that drop down. One of the other things that you wrote that really landed with me, you write, if the testimony of some people doesn't

matter, it means we are not evaluating evidence on its own terms, but rather evaluating evidence on the terms of who the evidence comes from. So beyond your experience and beyond the experience of sort of like what it's like to exist in this field, even when we zoom the lens out and more broadly, we say, okay, you know, in this domain of science where we're looking for the capital T truth or whatever, you know it we can get to, and we want answers and we want solutions in some way, we want to make sense of the world around us and we want to see if we can somehow live better. That quest, when we're effectively erasing people from it or when we're not recognizing contribution, we all suffer for that. Yeah, I think we do all suffer for that. And I think the flip side is that unfortunately, there are people who need to hear it in those terms before they care. They're like, well, I mean, sure, that person's suffering, but whatever,

I'm not suffering. They need to hear that it's bad for their business or bad for the economy or whatever before like they give a fuck about like whether people are being brutalized and dehumanized or not and i think that that for me is like a point of frustration that we are still at this point where you know we are multiculturalist and we believe in integration and that racism is bad and all of this other stuff but we still can't convince people that if you like truly hold the value that racism is bad and all of this other stuff. But we still can't convince people that if you like truly quote the value that racism is bad, that like you have to take seriously that even if, you know, ending racism actually isn't good for your bottom line right

now, that it is good for your like moral bottom line. But people don't really seem to have like a moral bottom. Like I think that that's the problem is the absence of a moral bottom line, but people don't really seem to have like a moral bottom. Like, I think that that's the problem is the absence of a moral bottom line. And so there is kind of also this assumption that people who are minoritized in some way or marginalized in some way should be able to stomach more. And I think that that's the other piece of what we were just talking about, which is when people say, well, like, oh, it's just a little thing. It was just that one professor asking you, like, about your Jewishness or giving you a Hebrew test has happened during a scientific visit. Yeah, but why should I have to stomach that? Like, why?

Like, nobody should have to stomach that. But there is this kind of assumption that we should have to stomach that. And I will say that actually probably you're catching me on a week when I'm particularly tired at the end of it because I had an experience at the start of my week where I was put on the spot during a public event by the people who had invited me to the event knew that there was someone who had kind of like a nasty question for me. And then they actually opened the public Q&A by asking me to answer this nasty question. And the idea was like, well, she can handle it. That had to be part of the rationale behind it. And it was like, yeah, but why should I have to? I mean, the other thing is that we know from the data, right,

is that making that assumption about Black people actually just means that we lead shorter lives. Like, yes, we can handle it because we're borrowing time from later. I just, yeah. I don't even know how to respond to that. I mean, it's like what I said in response to the question is it's just gross, right? It's gross. Right. It's, yeah. You know, I used the phrase sense-making before, and it's like when you think about experiences like that, and you're like, well, is there any sense making a lens on this? And no. I mean, again, you know, in terms of like thinking about orientation about what data matters, it doesn't have a logic to it. But then it totally has, it has this kind of like

traditional logic of ensuring that some people never have to feel destabilized in their social location, right? And so it is ensuring some people's security in exchange for other people having little to no security, right? And there's a gradient there, obviously, that's shaped by the different ways we have access to social capital. But I think, you know, coming back to the questions about my childhood and having an analysis, being able to see it for what it is doesn't necessarily feel great. Because there is this element of like, I can go out and I can fight the thing and I can write this book, but there are a lot of ways that I still feel very powerless about it. And even like in

that moment on Monday felt powerless because I knew that how I responded and like how angry I looked and how angry I sounded that there were going to be people who were going to be judging like how I handled myself. And that I didn't know if any of those people were going to be people who will later have power over me. Like that's always the, that's always the calculation when you're in an academic space, especially pre-tenure. But even after tenure, I have a research group I need to support. And that means that I need to be successful at getting grants. And I don't see who's going to be evaluating those grants. So in every audience, I have to assume that the person I've just told, like, hey, that's a biased comment, is maybe going to be the next person reading my grant application.

And while all this is going on, you know, you said yes to this at the age of 10 because you loved physics, you know, like, this is like, so you're out there every day and, and you're sort of like stepping into these multiple sort of like heavily weighted constructs that keep piling on top of each other and are requiring a certain amount of your energy and your time and your attention. And you bundle that with sort of like the ferocious activism and the ethos that you were brought up with. And rather than you reaching a point in your life where you're like, I love, I want to be a theoretical cosmologist. I would love to spend all of my time deepening into this. You can't because the fundamental nature of the way that you stepped into this field and who you are as a human being requires you to perpetually allocate a certain amount of your bandwidth, cognitive, emotional, everything, to other things, which just piles onto the fundamental injustice. Yeah, I mean, I was telling someone

after this experience on Monday who was raising questions about like, well, people think that I've just had like smooth sailing in my career and I'm doing really well, but also there were all of these struggles and people think that I have it easy. This is a queer black woman that I was talking to. And I was like, look,

the fact that you have achieved so much in such a short span of time signals how brilliant you are. Because nobody was just going to like open the door for someone like you and be like, walk through it. That's not how that works. So as I talk about in the book, like imagine how much more we could do. If we're already achieving in spite of all of this, imagine how much more we could be doing for ourselves, for our communities, whatever we want to do with our time if we're already achieving in spite of all of this? Imagine how much more we could be doing for ourselves, for our communities, whatever we want to do with our time if we weren't spending part

of our bandwidth dealing with this. And I will complicate my decision to stay with it because, of course, the question is, why would you stay with this? So part of it is there's no escaping white supremacist patriarchy. That was going to be wherever I went. And so I might as well actually do something that I feel passionate about. And I've been able to retain my sense of why am I here in that kind of fundamental way. The other thing is, is that the options for people with the kind of training that I have are not particularly great when it comes to making ethical choices. Like we're talking about weapons building. we're talking about weapons

building. We're talking about like messing the economy up with subprime mortgages. Like physicists were involved in doing those models, right? So in some sense, there's also a decision to kind of stay in the place where I feel like I have a grip on what the ethical challenges are and how I can respond to them rather than being put in another place where I feel like there may be worse in some ways. Yeah. I mean, I also think like this conversation is happening in a really powerful and important moment just in where we are. And I think so many people over the last couple of years have been re-examining literally every element of what they've said yes to, the culture they surround

themselves with, who they are and who they aren't, what their values are, and what they want to and what they are willing to put up with and why, and how much agency they have within those contexts to actually affect change if there's a part of it that is so close to the heart, which is what you're describing, but it also is almost impossible to divorce the ability to step into that part without also in some way navigating the bigger construct or culture. You're also sort of like in an interesting place in that, and tell me if I understand this right, cosmology is effectively in one way, it's trying to understand a world. It's trying to understand the story of who we are,

where we came from and where we're going and overlay science, math with that. So when you think about that in the context of your own life, do you feel like you spend time or think about sort of applying that methodology, like the scientific method that you were trained in, sort of reflecting internally and looking at your own life, where it is now and also where you would love it to go? I think one of the big takeaways from my journey in physics is that we are part of the universe. We can't get outside of the universe. We are part of the universe. So obviously, I want bias and racism and all of the phobias, et cetera, to be subtracted out of the equation. But I think it will always be the case that we as social

creatures will have to take ourselves into account when we're thinking about what scientific stories we're telling and why we tell those stories and which stories we place emphasis on. So I think that that piece will always be there. And I do think that ultimately everything that I do in terms of my intellectual work and my intellectual contributions are rooted in that desire to just understand how it all works. And unfortunately, that's required me also understanding how the things that are broken are functioning and in action in our society. And broken maybe from my perspective, but functioning exactly as designed from another person's perspective. So I do think that this is all part of the cosmological story. And I also think dreams deferred are part of the cosmological story, but I hope that there will be a generation for whom dreams deferred is something that they study, not something that they

live. So coming full circle, like as we're sitting here having this conversation in this context, in this broader container, like the name of the show is Good Life Project. So we are always deepening into the question of what it means to live a good life. So if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up for you? To live in good relations with our ecosystems and with the understanding that that includes the people around us. Thank you. Before you leave, if you love this episode, safe bet you'll also love the conversation we had with Jill Bolte-Teller about the science of the brain. You'll find a link to Jill's episode in the show notes.

And of course, if you haven't already done so, go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you appreciate the work that we've been doing here on Good Life Project, go check out my new book, Sparked. It will reveal some incredibly eye-opening things about maybe one of your favorite subjects, you, and then show you how to tap these insights to reimagine and reinvent work as a source of meaning, purpose, and joy. You'll find a link in the show notes, or you can also find it at your favorite bookseller now. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. a good life project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

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