"The Five Black Women PhDs of Theoretical High Energy Physics"

"It can be hard to enjoy physics when one is constantly being bombarded by the noise of an outside world that was explicitly designed to lock people like you out of what constitutes “success” in this society. When I say that the world was explicitly designed to lock people out, I am not being hyperbolic. I am descended on one side from a people who were never supposed to learn to read but rather were supposed to keep picking sugar cane in the fields until forever. On the other, I am descended from a people who were supposed to shed all ethno-religious markers or accept legally-entrenched discrimination until forever. When I was born, my parents’ marriage had only been legal in the entire U.S.A. for 15 years. I was never supposed to happen outside of the context of slavery and rape, much less learn to read, get an education, go to Harvard or get a PhD in theoretical physics. The world was not designed for me...

I had never in my life experienced such perfect intellectual peace and equilibrium reading a technical physics document as I did while I was reading her dissertation. Part of this is due to her incredible facility with the material, which she explains with a rare clarity. But part of it also, I recognized almost immediately, was because there were no questions hanging in the air of whether someone like me could do this. Someone like me had done this, and I was reading the glorious product."
https://medium.com/@chanda/the-five-black-women-phds-of-theoretical-high-energy-physics-7a18ccc18d8a

This really inspires me to read the work of black women in neuroscience.
(credit to AA)