Washington Monthly - September/October 2020 - 29

to affirmative action. There are plenty of reasons why highly
qualified students of color feel unwelcome in technical fields.
But one of the most overlooked is the focus of the STEM
community itself-and its disconnect from the lived experiences of Black students. Surveys suggest that STEM professors
and professionals tend to be interested in having students acquire technical expertise for its own sake, or in order to make
money and promote America's geopolitical advantage. Black
students, disproportionately familiar with the many injustices in American society, tend to be more interested in acquiring
technical expertise to effect social change.
"The people who are in most STEM programs and run
most STEM organizations are not from those same backgrounds and do not have those same kinds of concerns," Irizarry told me. Their teaching, she said, can lead many Black students to feel lost or unwelcome.
That can be true for everyone from freshmen to nearly
complete PhDs. McElwee, for example, told me that both he
and other Black, socially minded engineering students encounter pushback against their work. "I've had some Caucasian
advisers or have heard of other Caucasian advisers saying, 'Is
this really important? How is this technical?' Which is sometimes a little bit discouraging, because in addition to championing our own research, we have to defend these things being
worth studying."
But the worthiness should be evident, because the applications are everywhere. The city of Flint used a machinelearning algorithm to find lead-tainted water pipes. After Michael Brown's shooting in 2014, three Black teenagers built
an app that lets people rate their individual interactions with
the police. Academic engineers are at the forefront of figuring out how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, perhaps
the most technically challenging and politically urgent problem on the planet. This work helps the underserved in particular, but it also helps people in general. Everyone will in
some way have to contend with the consequences of a dangerously changing environment.
Indeed, the upsides of socially conscious, diverse STEM
grads should be apparent to even aggressive for-profits. Electric car sales are rising, and with better technology, consultancy firms believe that such vehicles will become extremely lucrative for auto manufacturers-while also helping fight climate
change. Skin care companies could tap into a bigger market if
they hired Black chemists who have thought at length about
how cosmetics impact darker tones. Reid Smith of Purdue got
funding from Procter & Gamble to investigate how women can
more effectively style curly hair.
"A lot of women have gone natural, which means
[they've] stopped putting chemical relaxers in their hair to
permanently straighten their hair," she explained. Instead,
many have turned to blow dryers and flat irons to adjust
patterning. But using too much heat can also permanently
change hair patterns in unwanted ways. "There's thousands
and thousands of women trying to do tutorials on how to
prevent heat damage, and I'm like, 'You know, mechanical

engineers study heat transfer. This would be an interesting,
fun project to work on at a research level.' "
Much of Smith's career is an example of how the hard sciences can be used to make the world a better place. One of the
reasons she got a PhD was because she wanted to use engineering to improve medical treatments after watching her grandparents die of diabetes. Now a tenured academic, Smith's laboratory is full of psychology tools such as EEGs and eye trackers that measure human stress. She's using them to figure out
ways engineers can design more compassionate and comfortable machines, including in the health care field.
"One need not be in a nonprofit to motivate social justice concerns," Irizarry said. "An engineering firm that has a
diverse group of engineers will be a lot more creative in how
they think about the infrastructure of a particular community,
which can improve social justice concerns while getting contracts and getting paid."

I

t is, of course, unfair to make Black academics and professionals responsible for getting the STEM community to
care about justice. Their white counterparts need to also
see why these topics are important for the world-and why
bringing more people of color into STEM fields is itself critical
to making the U.S. more equitable. And one upside of having
more socially conscious STEM curriculums is that all incoming
students, not just Black ones, will be more exposed to the progressive applications of their subjects. The U.S. needs more engineers, mathematicians, and scientists of all backgrounds to
focus on tackling problems like gun violence and environmental disasters. If STEM teachers and colleagues emphasize such
issues, that's more likely to happen.
But for now, many Black researchers are leading the
charge. McElwee's ultimate career goal, becoming a professor
himself, is motivated by a desire to serve his community and
bring more people like him into engineering. "I've yet to have
an African American science, technology, or math professor
at Carnegie Mellon or Berkeley," he said. "I want to be part of
the solution." To that end, he's taught for the last several years
at Carnegie Mellon's free summer STEM program for underrepresented high school students-the Summer Academy for
Math and Science (SAMS)-an analog of the one he attended
at MIT. He described it as the "excitement of his year."
Much of his teaching is focused on showing students that
STEM is fun. His pupils build popsicle stick bridges that can
support hundreds of pounds and design pinball machines. But
he also brings up themes of social justice. In one class, McElwee had students look at the effects of natural disasters,
much as he does. That included talking about how they impact people of color. "The overall course was looking at various
types of disasters, but also making them aware that there's a
ton of literature out here about communities that are disproportionately affected," he said. "Even in the SAMS program, I
try to distill those nuggets."
Daniel Block is an editor at the Washington Monthly.
Washington Monthly  29



Washington Monthly - September/October 2020

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