Science must overcome its racist legacy Guest editors Melissa Nobles, Chad Womack, Ambroise Wonkam and Elizabeth Wathuti are leading Nature on a journey to help decolonize research and forge a path towards restorative justice and reconciliation
Researching race and science matters, not only because these ideas influenced science, but because they became attractive to decision-makers, with horrific effects. People in power who advocated or participated in colonization and/or slavery used science, scientists and scientific institutions to rationalize and justify these practices.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the French diplomat and social theorist Arthur de Gobineau wrote an essay justifying white supremacy. De Gobineau thought that “all civilizations derive from the white race [and] none can exist without its help”. He argued that civilizations eventually collapse when different peoples mix. To advance his theory, he classified people according to their skin colour and social backgrounds. White aristocrats were given the highest category, Black people the lowest.
These views are evident in the case of Thomas Babington Macaulay, a historian and colonial administrator in India during the British Empire, who famously wrote in 1835 that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”. These were not idle words.
The effects of historical racism and power imbalances have also found their way into the research funding and publishing systems of high-income countries. The National Institutes of Health, the United States’ main funder of biomedical science, recognizes that there is structural racism in biomedical research. The funder is implementing solutions that are starting to narrow gaps.
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