The Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine unequivocally condemns the recent murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, David McAtee, and the many more Black people killed by police, law enforcement, and vigilantes. Moreover, we condemn the racist state-sponsored violence against Black people in the United States and around the globe. We recognize that white supremacist violence, and more specifically anti-Black violence, is historically intertwined with U.S. institutions, policies, and culture, and that it is also acutely visible in individual instances of oppression. We support the recent statements made by the leadership of Rhetoric Society of America, National Communication Association, and the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing.
Science, technology, and medicine are intimately tethered to racist oppression and violence. From the colonial foundations of enlightenment science (Galleano, 1997) to the 18th century rewriting of Greek and Roman natural philosophy to erase contributions from Africa and Asia (Bernal, Black Athena), racism is deeply rooted in Western scientific enterprise so commonly referenced in ARSTM scholarship. From the “friction-free racism” enabled by surveillance capitalism (Gilliard, 2018) to the automation of anti-Blackness via discriminatory algorithms (Eubanks, 2017; Noble, 2018) to the use of genomics to reinscribe eugenicist and colonialist ideas (Ceccarelli, 2013; Happe, 2013), technology has long been a mechanism for building and expanding racist structures. From the eugenic sterilization boards of North Carolina (Schoen, 2001) to the “construction of Sickle Cell Anemia as a black disease” (Robvais, 2020) to the withholding of information and treatment from Black people in the United States Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee University (Lynch, 2019), medical racism harms the health outcomes of Black people, regardless of socio-economic status (Geronimus et al, 2006; Squires, 2020; Davis, 2019; Hardeman et al, 2016, Yam, 2020).
As rhetoricians of science, technology, and medicine, it is our ethical responsibility to acknowledge and reckon with the injustices central to the topics we study. And it is our responsibility to critique and resist the use of science, technology, and medicine as tools for the oppression of Black, Brown, and Indigenous People. We can and should use the rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine to call out and address institutional racism and to amplify and support those who are already doing that work, from #BlackInSTEM advocates to anti-surveillance community groups to reproductive justice activists and beyond.
ARSTM is organizationally enmeshed in these systems and thus remains complicit, even while working to dismantle these often invisible structures that naturalize anti-Black oppression and violence. As Ibram X. Kendi writes, “there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. The opposite of ‘racist’ isn’t ‘not racist.’ It is ‘anti-racist” (2019, p. 9). We commit to making anti-racist change within our own organization in specific material ways, which are detailed, along with next steps and specific deadlines in an action plan on our website. These actions are not an end point for ARSTM. Instead, they are a tangible starting point for collective deliberation, advocacy, and action.
To echo other leaders, thank you to those of you already doing anti-racist work, and to those who respond to this and other calls to action.
Black lives matter.
Signed,
Emily Winderman, ARSTM President
Lauren Cagle, ARSTM 1st Vice-President
Kenneth Walker, ARSTM 2nd Vice-President
Daniel Card, ARSTM Secretary
Danielle DeVasto, Social Media Officer
Jay Frank, Web Administrator
Molly Kessler, ARSTM Treasurer
S. Scott Graham, ARSTM Board Member
John A. Lynch, ARSTM Board Member
Zoltan P. Majdik, ARSTM Board Member
Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher, ARSTM Board Member
Lynda C. Olman, ARSTM Board Member
James Wynn, ARSTM Board Member
References
Bernal, M. (1987). Black Athena: The Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization; Volume 1, The fabrication of ancient Greece 1785-1985. Rutgers University Press.
Ceccarelli, L. (2013). On the frontier of science: An American rhetoric of exploration and exploitation. Michigan State University Press.
Davis, D. A. (2019). Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth (Vol. 7). NYU Press.
Eubanks, V. (2017). Automating inequality: How high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor (First Edition). St. Martin’s Press.
Galleano, E. (1997). Open veins of Latin America: Five centuries of the pillage of a continent. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.
Geronimus, A. T., Hicken, M., Keene, D., & Bound, J. (2006). “Weathering” and age patterns of allostatic load scores among blacks and whites in the United States. American journal of public health, 96(5), 826-833.
Gilliard, C. (2018, October 15). Friction-Free Racism. Real Life. https://reallifemag.com/friction-free-racism/
Happe, K.E. (2013). The material gene: Gender, race, and heredity after the human genome project. New York, NY: New York University Press
Hardeman, R. R., Medina, E. M., & Kozhimannil, K. B. (2016). Dismantling structural racism, supporting Black lives and achieving health equity: Our role. The New England journal of medicine, 375(22), 2113.
Kendi, I. X. (2019). How to be an antiracist (First Edition). One World.
Lynch, J. A. (2019). The Origins of Bioethics: Remembering When Medicine Went Wrong. MSU Press.
Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. New York University Press.
Roberts, D. (2012). Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century. New York, NY: The New Press.
Robvais, R. (2020). We are No Longer Invisible. Poroi, 15(1). https://doi.org/10.13008/2151-2957.1296
Schoen, J. (2001). Between choice and coercion: Women and the politics of sterilization in North Carolina, 1929-1975. Journal of Women’s History, 13(1), 132-156.
Squires, C. “Changing the Odds for Black Mothers,” Gender Policy Report (April 14, 2020), access: https://genderpolicyreport.umn.edu/changing-the-odds-for-black-mothers/
Yam, Shui-yin Sharon. “Visualizing Birth Stories from the Margin: Toward a Reproductive Justice Model of Rhetorical Analysis.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 50, no. 1 (2020): 19-34.