Chanda Prescod-Weinstein Profile picture
Oct 5, 2018 19 tweets 6 min read Read on X
PARTICLES FOR JUSTICE IS LIVE! I am proud to be a co-author on this statement from high energy physicists:

particlesforjustice.org
"We write here first to state, in the strongest possible terms, that the humanity of any person, regardless of ascribed identities such as race, ethnicity, gender identity, religion, disability, gender presentation, or sexual identity is not up for debate."
"Belittling the ability and legitimacy of scientists of color and white women scientists using such flimsy pretexts is disgraceful, and it reveals a deep contempt for more than half of humanity that clearly comes from some source other than scientific logic."
"It will add to the obstacles that women and gender minorities, as well as men from traditionally underrepresented communities, struggle with on a daily basis."
On the page there is a form and other academics are welcome to join us, including physicists and astronomers, but not just physicists and astronomers. :-D
Yes, #histSTM and #STS folks, you can interview me for your future study on us LOLOL
Thanks to @RyanFMandelbaum for our first English language coverage, in @Gizmodo: gizmodo.com/over-200-physi…
“I think it’s really important for us to say what our values as a community are, and to be in disagreement with the values that he put forward in his talk,” Chanda Prescod-Weinstein . . . told Gizmodo.
"Prescod-Weinstein pointed out that the “scientists of color & white women scientists” language is intentionally used in response to a racist dog whistle in Strumia’s talk . . . and to highlight that women & men of color and white women have differing experiences as minorities."
Even though @iamstarnord was not an author on the document, I want to acknowledge his significant contributions over the last two days in helping to setup our google form, with decision making, and keeping me sane <3
It is, in my view, significant and not a coincidence that two of the three Black cosmologists with faculty-equivalent positions were involved in this. Look at the language. We are in there. #BlackandSTEM
I also want to again acknowledge @sheydaipek who sounded the alarm here on social media about what happened at CERN last Friday. Not only did she motivate a lot of people to get together to work on a response, but she in fact was a major contributor to the response!
We had great leadership from @physicsmatt not just in writing the statement but also on organizing the website, and I am proud of the name that I gave it, Particles for Justice.
Every member of the HEP 19 team contributed to the writing and to gathering signatures! People worked around the clock, and I think we're all pretty physically exhausted!!
Over 1000 people have additionally signed on! Many of them particle/high energy physicists, but there is wide support. Thank you! particlesforjustice.org/additional-sig…
Prescod-Weinstein adds, “This is a hint of the future, if we continue to work hard and recognize that ‘science’ isn’t just calculations but also who is in the room doing them.” #ParticlesforJustice
“I’m not remembering the last time, as a community, we really jumped up like this,” says physicist @iamstarnord #particlesforjustice

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More from @IBJIYONGI

Oct 8, 2018
Students of color feeling marginalized in STEM are not always people in need of remedial programming and assuming they need remedial programming is really problematic/hella racist
Learn to talk about people of color like we're the same species as you
Now that I have a moment to expand on this: what I said to the room where this was said today is that white people are the majority of people on welfare. It’s important to know the difference between majority and disproportional. Minorities are disproportionately poor, yes.
Read 9 tweets
Oct 7, 2018
Tomorrow and Tuesday I’m attending the #astro2020 decadal early career researchers workshop and as part of the requirements to attend, I had to read about 200 pages of (publicly available) documentation relating to the last decadal. I learned some things!
1. Apparently the NASA budget doubled between 1988 and 1991
2. The National Research Council *is* part of the National Academies (which are charged by law to produce a decadal survey in the various earth and space sciences every 10 years)
Read 12 tweets
Oct 6, 2018
There is seriously a thread of white women in my mentions very committed to denying white women's complicity in white supremacy, in response to a tweet from a Black Lives Matter organizer who has, you know, thought about this for longer than 5 minutes
When I pointed out to one of them that she was a repeat offender, she said I had cyberbullied her when calling her out on something I saw her do last year by letting folks know that her response to me was condescending and privileged
When I pointed out she had shown up in my mentions today, she deleted her tweet and didn't apologize for acting like I was the aggressor. Now every time I think the thread has died, another white woman steps in to wake it up again. Almost all of them are scientists.
Read 4 tweets
Oct 3, 2018
Thing I felt grateful for today: as a child of divorce and an international activist family, I spent a lot of time on planes and sometimes in passport offices alone, and along the way, many adults took an interest and talked to me and this meant I never felt alone or scared
Props to the woman at the passport office who enjoyed my diatribe about Jane Austen and later mailed me an old BBC adaptation that I hadn’t seen. Btw turns out a 13 yo needs a parent present to renew a passport, much to my dad’s chagrine lol
And to the many business travelers who, rather than wondering what the hell I was doing in business class (where the flight attendants often put unaccompanied minors back then), played cards with me and talked to me about my dolls.
Read 5 tweets
Oct 3, 2018
This tweet 👇🏽 is flat out wrong. Speaking as someone who does gender studies in addition to particle physics — gender studies is actually a notoriously difficult field to get published in, harder than physics actually, and only a few journals are really taken seriously.
It was actually easier for me to get a peer-reviewed paper on gender studies published in an astronomy journal than to get one published in a gender studies journal. I’ve now been successful in both. Let the critics say the same. ;-)
One piece of advice I got from a senior woman in science, technology and society studies who does race & gender in technology history was that gender studies is a very hard field and I should be careful. Her husband is a string theorist, so I think she knows what she’s saying. 😉
Read 4 tweets
Oct 3, 2018
Today took more out of me than it was supposed to, & I want to remind white people that what seems like “grammar” to you can actually be a very deep issue for Black people. Whether we are talking AAVE or how to make our struggles manifest in a language never meant to include us.
Standard professional English is not intersectional. As Adrienne Rich said “this is the oppressor’s language yet I need it to talk to you.” So we need to sit with our discomfort about new words and even new phrases that violate grammatical traditions.
For example, the phrase “women and minorities” only sounds like cine writing because we’ve heard it a lot and it follows grammatical rules about nouns. But it also erases women of color in a way that reifies whiteness while failing to acknowledge whiteness.
Read 16 tweets

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