American Grant Writing: Race Matters

PHPNerd writes "You might expect that science, particularly American science, would be color-blind. Though fewer people from some of the country's ethnic minorities are scientists than the proportions of those minorities in the population suggest should be the case, once someone has got bench space in a laboratory, he might reasonably expect to be treated on merit and nothing else. Unfortunately, a study just published in Science suggests that is not true. The study looked at the pattern of research grants awarded by the NIH and found that race matters a lot. Moreover, Asian and Hispanic scientists do just as well as white ones. Black scientists, however, fare badly."

Comments

It doesn't prove it's not merit based

[erroneus]

This is unconvincing. Here's the deal:

It is well known that U.S. born black people going through college in the US get breaks not afforded to everyone else. We have even seen egregious examples of passes that should have been fails and even examples of plagiarism that has gone unaddressed and unpunished when done by black people. We know all too well how the system seeks "fairness and balance" by giving advantage to the "disadvantaged." But what happens after graduation?

Well, let's just say, I would be reluctant to go to a black doctor and would be more inclined to go to a doctor from India. Does that make me a racist? Hell no it doesn't. It's the fact that there has been a huge and competitive flow of medical students from India and only the best can get through the process due to various numeric limitations put into place by administrations in the name of "fairness, balance and diversity." Meanwhile, in order to keep the numbers of black doctors higher, they have to make allowances quite often. But how does this affect quality? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that if you have to lower standards in order to boost numbers, then quality will drop.

Does that mean "black doctors and scientists are of lesser quality" because they are black? NO! Not if you rate them on merit... individually without consideration of race. But when you start considering race, then you will see there will be "fewer black people get grants."

There is a lot more going on behind the scenes than this article addresses. It certainly doesn't offer detailed statistics covering the spread of scores presented by the various applicants.

Racism needs to go away. Every time someone tries to make a point like this, it just goes to show how racist they actually are.

EVERYONE needs to stop stereotyping

[alispguru]

The way to make racism like this go away is:

EVERYONE has to stop judging people on irrelevant factors.

This means that government and academia has to stop having lower standards for people in oppressed groups.

It also means people like you have to stop assuming that the person in front of you was a beneficiary of those lower standards just because they are a member of an oppressed group.

Your reasoning above is correct statistically, but may be doing an injustice to the individual standing in front of you - an injustice that has the same effect as the racism that started the whole mess.