"The Diversity Racket"

"I knew I was going to be one of the first Black people, especially Black women, to become a theoretical physicist. But how I understood what that meant was so simple compared to the reality, especially since I didn’t realize how fundamental classism is to the way physics constructs itself as a community. I thought it just meant I would look different and my family would look different and that would be about it. The rest, I thought, was just a matter of doing the difficult work of learning physics: mechanics, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, and relativity.

Since I’ve already written about what it was really like, I won’t repeat myself here. In summary, the physics was hard but the physics community has always been harder. I’d like now to focus instead on something else: how it could be that I could put 15 years into a career only to have colleagues reduce me to an expert on my own discrimination, with my significant expertise in cosmology, quantum field theory, and general relativity a distant second...

And here is why I am now weary of a bunch of scientists running around talking about diversity and racism and homophobia and heternormativity and ableism: I’ve spent the last year dealing with a lot of people who usually operate outside the NSBP community who know all of these words, can school other people on how what they say doesn’t conform to an “anti-” stance on any one of them, and who can’t, for the life of them, remember that I am a scientist first."
https://medium.com/@chanda/the-diversity-racket-49948f899b9b

REAL. There are so many steps, which keeps on becoming apparent when you make a step and discover that you aren't there yet.

Sometimes it seems like that thing where you and a friend are trying to decide where to go for dinner, and they kinda just want to go to the restaurant around the corner even though it is boring and shitty, but you want to go to another restaurant that is superior in every way - but it's like a bit of a walk and you're not sure exactly how to get there but you think you can figure it out. And so, to convince your friend to go there, you tell them that it's really, really close and quick and easy. And then when you get down the block and they ask 'how far?' you again say 'it's like 10 seconds away, nbd, really close' and get them to walk another block.

It's like, theoretically the friend should be willing to put in some work just because you indicate that you want and need a better restaurant experience.