Decolonize the Sciences!

In “Embracing the Social in Social Science” (Issues, Spring 2024), Rayvon Fouché covers the full range of racialized phenomena in science, from criminal use of Black bodies as experimental subjects to the renaissance he maps out for new anti-racism networks, programs, and fellowships. His call for “baking in” the social critique, rather than adding it as mere diversity sprinkles on top, could not be clearer and more compelling.

Yet I know from my experience on National Science Foundation review boards, at science and engineering conferences, and in conversations with all sorts of scientific professionals that this depth is almost always mistranslated, misidentified, and misunderstood. Fouché is calling for creating a transformation, but most organizations and individuals are hearing only the elimination of bias. What is the difference?

The distinction is perhaps most obvious in my own field of computing. For example, loan algorithms tend to create higher interest rates for Black home buyers. Ethnicity is not a variable: data that correlate merely with “being Black” can be inferred by computing, even without human directives to do so. So it is difficult to oppose using the legal system, but tempting to solve as an algorithm problem.

As important as the elimination of bias truly is, it creates the illusion that if we could only eliminate bias, the problem would be solved. Bias does not address the more significant problem: in this case, that homes and loans are extremely expensive to begin with. The costs of loans and dangers of defaulting have destroyed working-class communities of every color; and “too big to fail” means that our algorithmic banking system turns risk for the entire nation’s economy into profits for banks’ own making. And that is not just the case for banking. In health, industry, agriculture, and science and technology in its many forms, eliminating bias merely creates equal exploitation for all, equally unsustainable lives, and forms of wealth inequality that “see no color.”

My colleagues will often conclude at this point that I am pointing toward capitalism, but I have spent my career trying to point out that communist nations generally show the same trends: wealth inequality, pollution, failure to support civil rights. And that is, from my point of view, largely because they use the same science and engineering, formulated around the principles of optimization for extracting value. Langdon Winner, the scholar known for his “artifacts have politics” thesis, was wrong, but only in that the destructive effects of technological artifacts occur no matter what the “politics” is. Communists extract value to the state, and capitalists extract value to corporations, but both alienate it from the cycles of regeneration that Indigenous societies were famously dedicated to. If we want a just and sustainable future, a good place to start is to decolonize our social sciences, not just critique science for failing to embrace them, and perhaps develop that as mutual inquiries across the divide.

What would it take to create a science and technology dedicated not to extracting value, but rather to nurturing its circulation in unalienated forms? Funding from NSF, the OpenAI Foundation, and others have kindly allowed our research network to explore these possibilities. We invite you to examine what regenerative forms of technoscience might look like at https://generativejustice.org.

Ron Eglash

Rayvon Fouché argues that social science, especially those branches that study inequity, must become integral to the practice of science if we want to both address and avoid egregious harms of our past and present. Indeed, methodologies and expertise from the social sciences are rarely included in the shaping and practice of scientific research, and when they are, they are only what Fouché likens to “sprinkles on a cupcake.”

Metaphors are essential to describing abstract processes, and every gifted science teacher I ever had excelled at creating them to help students understand how invisible forces can create such visible effects and govern the behavior of the things that we can feel and see. As the noted physicist Alan Lightman famously noted, “metaphor is critical to science.” The metaphors that we use matter, perhaps especially in regard to scientific understanding and education, and I find the metaphor of “science” as a cupcake and the social sciences as sprinkles very useful.

The many disasters and broken promises that have destroyed Black and other marginalized peoples’ trust in the medical establishment might have been averted had experts from other fields been empowered to produce persuasive arguments against their use beforehand. To move to another metaphor, Fouché describes the long-standing effects of “scientific inequity” as practiced upon Black populations as a “residue,” a sticky trace that persists across historical time. The image vividly explains why it is that some people of colors’ mistrust of science and unwillingness to engage with it as a career can be understood as an empirically informed and rational decision.

As Fouché shows, science becomes unethical and uncreative when it excludes considerations of the social and the very real residues of abuse and disregard that produce disaffection and disengagement. At the same time, the “social” has itself been the object of mistrust and cynicism, with some observers asserting that governments ought not be responsible for taking care of people, but rather that individuals and families need to rely upon themselves. Such ideas helped fuel the systematic defunding of public higher education and other “social” services. STEM fields and occupational fields such as business became more popular because they were seen as the best routes for students to pay off the sometimes life-long debt of a necessary college education. Correspondingly, the social sciences and the humanities have become luxury goods. The state’s unwillingness to support training in these fields is one reason that nonscientific expertise is viewed as a sprinkle, sometimes even to those of us who practice it and teach it to others.

At the same time, this expertise has never been needed more: the fascination, excitement, and horror of artificial intelligence’s breakneck and generally unregulated and unreflective adoption suggests that we greatly need experts in metaphor, meaning, inference, history, aesthetics, and style to “tune” these technologies and make them usable, or even to convincingly advocate for their abandonment. In a bit of good news, recent study of “algorithmic abandonment” demonstrates that users and institutions will stop using applications once they learn that they consistently produce harmful effects. At the same time, it’s hard to “embrace the social” when there is less of it to get our arms around. The scientific community still needs what Fouché calls a “moral gut check,” akin to Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 encouragement to “support the sustenance of human life.” For to care about the social is to care for each other rather than just for ourselves.

Lisa Nakamura

Rayvon Fouché’s call to “lean into the social” and to reckon with science’s “residues of inequity” must be answered if scientists are to help create more equitable and just societies. Achieving this goal, he admits, will require the difficult work of transforming the “traditions, beliefs, and institutions” of science. I concur.

Yet I want to clarify that held within this science that requires transformation are the social sciences themselves. After World War II, the natural, physical, and social sciences all were reconstructed from the same conceptual cloth, one that assumed that truth and justice depended upon the separation of science from society.

For Fouché, this separation must end. His reasons are compelling: without fundamental knowledge of and engagement with the communities and societies out of which sciences arise, scientists operate in moral and social vacuums that too often lead to harm, when what is meant is good. Yet the idea that science should exist in a “pure” space apart from society is deeply baked into today’s scientific institutions.

It could have been otherwise. After the US bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, some prominent politicians and scientists called for an end to the purposeful seclusion of science from society that the Manhattan Project embodied. However, a countervailing force emerged in a troubling form, pseudoscience. At the same time the United States funded physicists to create atom bombs, Germany and the Soviet Union—building on efforts begun in the United States—bluntly directed genetics into policies of racial purification. In response, most geneticists argued that the murderous force of resulting racial hygiene laws lay not in their science, but rather in its perversion by political power. As a result, many geneticists retreated from their political activism of the 1920s and ’30s.

For their part, prominent social scientists, including the pioneering sociologist Robert K. Merton, argued that science was a wellspring of ethos that democracies needed, and to ensure these ethos survived, science should exist in an autonomous space. Just like markets of classic political economy, science ought to be left alone. This argument expanded to become a central tenet of the West during the Cold War.

In a matter of a few short years, then, science transformed from a terrifying destructive force that needed to be held in check by democratic institutions to one that would itself protect democracies. The natural, physical, and social sciences all embraced this idea of being inherently good and democratic—and thus to be protected from abuse by the unjust concentration of government power. This historically and institutionally entrenched illusion has left contemporary sciences, including the social sciences, poorly equipped to recognize and respond to the many and consequential ways in which their questions inextricably entangle with questions of power.

I agree with Fouché that more trustworthy sciences require addressing these entanglements. The critical question is how. My colleagues and I are currently seeking answers through the Leadership in the Equitable and Ethical Design (LEED) of Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine initiative. After decades of building institutional practices and protocols designed to separate science from society, this task will not be easy. Those of us involved with LEED of STEMM look forward to working with Fouché and other visionary scientific leaders to rebuild scientific institutions not around Cold War visions of security and separation, but rather around contemporary critical needs to forge the common grounds of collaboration.

Jenny Reardon