This article was published in multiple avenues and is getting a big platform. I want however to highlight that none of the authors are equity and inclusion experts. I used to be a co-author and left because our visions of what a piece like this should accomplish didn't align. https://twitter.com/sirfrasersays/status/1295381449030369283

I want to give my thoughts about the article as a scholar of DEI, as someone who has worked on the field and did a PhD focused on this. So I will start with this idea of "opening up a new era of diversity, equity & inclusion"

The door to this era has been opened for a while, people are just not walking through it. I think is problematic to think we can with an article do something like that when we know historical institutions take many many years to change. And it takes the literal blood of many

You want to talk about diversity & inclusion in science. Great!! FIRST LISTEN TO THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN MARGINALIZED. Their voices are not being published by JACS or nature chem but their voices is what matter

If you are going to cite the literature, actually read the literature. It takes years of sitting with it, reflecting on it to see the big picture. Where is the cite to crenshaw? to @IBJIYONGI? to all the critical race theorists and black feminists

And acknowledge the following five things:
1. Any scientific endeavor of today is built over the foundations of scientific colonialism. Structure of knowledge, practices, and power that were created as a result of the transatlantic slave trade.

2. Accepted practices and knowledge are those who conform to eurocentric ways of knowing. And ask all other ways of knowing to be discarded

3. The centering of Women in STEM in most diversity conversations, omits the intersectional experiences of BIWOC and erases trans and non-binary identities.

4. Science is fundamentally heteropatriarchal, white supremacist, transphobic, and ableist.

5. A lot of what we consider foundational to science today was originally thought, developed, and appropriated from non-European cultures

I want of course chemists from all subfields to think about DEI and support it. Policy action cannot thrive within a broken system.

I specifically have an issue with this quote: "The first step towards beginning to understand these challenges is the collection of reliable data, informed by both marginalized scientists’ experiential knowledge and equity informed methods."

Modern quantitative methods were literally built to support eugenics. Like I am a quantitative researcher but we need to first accept our history

The historical role of quantitative methods on the oppression of marginalized populations IS THE REASON of why critical theory and qualitative research rose in opposition to this. THAT IS WHY STEP ONE IS LISTENING.

Lesson 1 from how we have used quant terrible. Demographics are not characteristic. That is biological determinism. They are social constructs that create identities. Some of them we choose others are imposed on us

If you are going to mention #sciencetwitter as a support mechanism to marginalized scientists then you need to acknowledge the work of @ThePurplePage she literally did the groundwork to make this a space where we could find our communities #BlackInSTEM

Mentorship is of course super important. But then say that mentors have to educate themselves. Many of us had mentors that had a lot of privilege and as their first "diverse" student we had to do a lot of educating

If you take a student that has different identities than yours 1) Read and understand the system that presses them 2) Listen because though we have shared experiences we also have unique experiences with the system

And finally (for now). I want @NatureChemistry @ChemicalScience @J_A_C_S @angew_chem @cdnsciencepub to reflect on how they gave a HUGE PLATFORM to non-experts the next time they want to reject a chemistry education research paper saying "this is not chemistry"