September 10th, 2020

Dear Harvard Colleagues and Friends,

Shaken by the conjunction of George Floyd’s senseless arrest and murder, so heartbreakingly highlighting the out-of-sight snuffing of many innocent #Blacklives at the hands of those whose duty should have been to protect them; by the constant stirring of racial hatred by our current US administration; by the disproportionate toll that the #COVID19 pandemic has extracted from our Black and Latinx working class communities and by the utter lack of a community mechanism at the Genetics department that would allow everyone to meaningfully come together at times of hardship, to process painful and potentially polarizing realizations and to generate solutions to address both the symptoms and root causes of structural racism in our society, we came together to form the HMS Genetics Antiracism Group (@antiracist_Gen).

Our first group initiatives were to raise awareness through a sit-in and to engage leadership in the organization of the first Genetics Town Hall meeting to be held on Sept 30th, 2020. This is just the beginning of our call to the department of genetics to create a self-sustaining social infrastructure that can crystalize antiracist ideas and turn them into concrete actions that collectively change the culture of science at HMS Genetics and beyond. Here we present a series of ideas for initiatives that we have collectively developed after extensive dialogue with members of the community, including leadership, with Harvard DICP and with other antiracist groups on campus. These focus on some of the most glaring issues affecting our community and on which we believe we can collectively make immediate headway. The list is by no means exhaustive. Please feel free to contribute your input on these initiatives or point out what we have missed by emailing us at AntiRacism.HMSGen@gmail.com. We would love your feedback.

1. We strongly echo the call by #MatchmeHrvd on their recent letter to increase the diversity of the workforce providing mental health services and require ALL providers to be trained in treating racial trauma. In this especially challenging time, in a profession well-known for a tendency to erode, stigmatize and undervalue mental health we also call for a community survey to assess if adequate levels of mental care are being provided and utilized specifically in our departamental community (ie. awareness of services, comfort level with utilization, wait times, follow-up, contiguity of care, helpfulness of the treatment) If care is currently inadequate due to understaffing, we call for the urgent creation of mental health support circles facilitated by our mental health providers in order to increase access now.

2. In many settings, diversity is the key to innovation. This is likely not simply because URMs innovate at higher rates, but because relating across cultures enhances creativity. Although the representation of African-American and Latinx ethnicities in our department is currently dismal and fostering the sense of belonging and inclusion of our Black and Latinx members should be the main focus; the diversity and richness of experiences and backgrounds of the people who work at the genetics department is much greater than what is captured by the categories employed by the NSF and NIH to measure diversity with US-specific racial constructs. Our department is fortunate to attract a large international workforce. We need to design community efforts to better integrate and relate across backgrounds if we want to fully realize the benefits,  and not just the challenges, of that diversity. We see communally creating events and initiatives that enhance cross-cultural understanding and participation in the genetics department as a cornerstone of building and supporting a radically inclusive culture here and beyond as well as restoring the international reputation of US academic science that has been badly tarnished by the current social unrest and the mishandling of the pandemic.

3. Inadequate Mentorship negatively affects all trainees but it can especially impact the careers of URM trainees. We recognize that adapting mentorship style to relate and best support trainees with a very different background to one’s own can be especially challenging. We need to fund a program to provide and require specific training on mentorship across identities  for all current PIs. All faculty should be both cognizant of and empowered to understand how to better relate with, and handle the needs of students and postdocs from diverse backgrounds and support their training to succeed at Harvard and beyond. Postdoctoral Fellows and Graduate students should also separately receive training in culturally aware mentorship since we are the faculty of the future and we want to avoid reproducing the problems inherent in the culture in which we have been trained.  

4. Creating a Virtual Science Outreach Platform  (Israel Pichardo in the Sinclair lab submitted a pilot proposal for this to the department last month) directed towards Black and Latinx highschoolers in the public school system that encourages participation from the whole community (not just URMs), communicates our love and enthusiasm for science but most importantly builds relationships with students and lowers the barrier-to-entry to a science career (and is also time-efficient for the scientists who volunteer).

5. Tapping Spanish, Portuguese and English speaking scientists from our community to communicate clear info about COVID19 and COVID19 testing to contractor cleaning staff to help heal the mistrust and fraught relationship that has been caused by mishandling the relationship by HMS  & supporting their negotiations with the admin to receive better communication and treatment. We also hope to build on this relationship with custodial staff, etc over time to develop a series of science communication events directed towards that part of our community and centered on topics of their interest. This is a collaboration between Marta Florio,Yasmin Escobedo, Israel Pichardo and Jean Phane.

6. We want to bring visibility to the current research that points to a pipeline-decoupling in academic careers of URMs that starts at the PhD-to-Postdoc transition and worsens at the Postdoc-to-Faculty and Faculty-to-Tenured-Faculty point. This is despite most URMs wanting to pursue academic careers. What this means is that while increasing science outreach at the high-school and undergraduate levels is noble, and worth doing for its own sake, it will not lead to an increase in the representation of minorities at higher levels in academia.  One point of the academic pipeline where we can start making an impact concerns the buddy-network nature of postdoctoral applications, which as we all know are made by directly reaching out to faculty who may never even open an email if it doesn’t come from a friend's lab or at least a familiar name is a particularly sore spot. Creation of a Departmental Level Postdoc Hiring Platform to recruit, onboard and track URM hires would help rid the transition of bias and also create a natural structure on which to build more community among recruited trainees. An initiative along these lines, has just begun at Stanford.

7. The recently announced HMS Life sciences Cluster Hire that aims to increase diversity is open to candidates of all backgrounds because Harvard is an Equal Opportunity Employer. This amplifies the importance of asking questions such as: What are the criteria by which candidates will be selected to be hired? Postdocs share a general frustration with the lack of clarity on what are the criteria their faculty applications will be evaluated on. What, for example, does it mean to have a “a demonstrated commitment to fostering diversity and equity” and how have criteria previously applied to hiring contributed to the lack of diversity in our department ? How will new criteria be developed for future hires such that they reflect the scholarly promise of applicants (not just in spite of challenges overcome but perhaps because of them) and not which candidates have been the lucky recipients of the most privileges. How will we as a community support these new PIs once they are actually on campus?

8. Creating a structure of volunteer working groups in the department that focuses on specific initiatives and meets with leadership regularly and is supported by at least ONE permanent staff position who would also be our liaison with DICP. Advocating with HMS to create and fund this position. This is along the lines of what has already occurred in other departments such as Neurobiology, Systems Bio and Microbiology.

9. Creating a discussion space for the community in the form of a Journal Club (Elijah Kofte who leads the Science in Society Club has started one) to share and discuss structural racism related scientific articles, create summaries of their discussions to be shared with the wider community and in general promote community awareness and nuanced understanding of wider (non-academia) centered issues.

10. Collaborate with Faculty and leadership to apply and secure funding from NIH and other entities looking to support bold initiatives aimed at transforming the culture of science at academic institutions.

11. Creating a Cross-Departmental Super Group of antiracist groups and allies to share resources, develop joint initiatives, build community, advocate for allocation of funds with leadership and overcome the siloed nature of our university organizational structure.

12. Creating a part of our departamental website that clearly voices our collective support of these and other related initiatives, showcases our collective work (where we have made progress and where we have lagged) and acts as a community connector for sharing updates and lists contact info for a representative for each working group.

13. Several members of the community have expressed that they have been profiled by police on campus. We need to lead a community conversation on what role does HUPD truly serve on campus, the appropriateness of how they have been deployed in the past, and the appropriateness of their training to the actual functions we want them to serve on campus. We also need to come up with community specific resources that immediately provide support to our most affected members.

In Solidarity,

The Antiracism Genetics Working Group