And to some extent, it is, as we have benefited from the established norms for so long.” He attributes some of this to “nervousness on the part of white men that any discussion around changing the status quo is seen as a threat to them. In the wake of BLM, Imperial College decided to remove the Latin motto from displays of the college’s crest, which loosely translates as ‘Science is the empire’s crown jewel and protector.’ When this was announced in 2020, “there was a backlash, and quite a few alumni wrote in expressing their displeasure”, says structural biologist Stephen Curry, Imperial’s assistant provost for equality, diversity and inclusion, who is white. “There are a lot of material changes that need to happen - funding, career progression, more opportunities that target previously excluded groups,” she says. And it’s not just, or even primarily, about names. “If Imperial does not honestly contend with its history of racism, it makes it easy for Black students and staff to continue to feel excluded and othered in their own institution,” says Elmahdi. Other institutions and scientific departments around the globe are seeking to recast curricula and address racism’s influence in shaping their fields. Imperial is one of a handful of UK scientific institutions examining racism in their own histories, and how to acknowledge and redress its legacy. (Some commented on the irony of the Huxley Building being potentially renamed while the institution’s name remained.) Most obviously, Imperial College, an amalgamation of several earlier institutions, founded in 1907 - when the Empire was at its height, covering nearly one-quarter of Earth’s total land area - is named for it. Scientific ideas and institutions were intimately connected to that legacy in London, the capital of the British Empire, that is particularly apparent. The arguments became part of the ‘culture wars’ - and British scientific institutions, along with others around the world, have been drawn into them.Īlthough the US debate has focused largely on systemic racism in the context of slavery and civil rights, the flashpoints in the United Kingdom are imperialism and colonialism, which involved white Europeans exploiting other ethnic groups, especially through the slave trade and oppression of Indigenous people. That action polarized public opinion, with some UK government ministers suggesting that history was being ‘erased’. In the United Kingdom, a key initial focus was the toppling of a statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol in 2020. The debate was largely catalysed by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement after the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May 2020. Whatever the eventual outcome, the fractious debate about how to deal with the cultural and institutional legacies of racism and colonialism will surely continue. Elmahdi, who earned a PhD at Imperial and previously worked there, adds: “I think it is an insult to the Black people who continue to work and study in a building named after a person who was so adamant in questioning their capabilities and equality.” “The purpose of naming a building after someone is to honour that person,” says Rahma Elmahdi, a Black clinician and epidemiologist at Aalborg University and Hillerød Hospital in Copenhagen. Not everyone agrees that this is the right move - especially those who have felt the sting of racism in their daily work as researchers. The decision was largely an attempt to balance the report’s recommendations with the views expressed by the university community in the consultations that followed its publication. A report prepared in November 2021 by a team of faculty members and internal and external advisers at Imperial College London had recommended stripping Huxley’s name from the mathematics and computing department building, and removing his bust from the entrance hall (see go./3smu1xf).īut after extensive consultation, the Imperial administrators decided not to accept the recommendation, and are instead now discussing other options: contextualizing Huxley’s status and views, and adding the name of a scientist associated with the college who is from an under-represented ethnic group to the Huxley Building. Huxley, a prominent advocate of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, promoted the racist view that Black people had inferior capabilities compared with white people. In February, the nineteenth-century naturalist Thomas Henry Huxley, escaped - in the eyes of some - from ‘cancellation’ at one of London’s most prestigious academic institutions.
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