https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/reader-center/black-mathematicians-research-academic-racism.html
feb 20 2019 For an article that ran on Tuesday’s front page, I interviewed a dozen or so black mathematicians about the subtle racial slights they have been subjected to by white and Asian colleagues. Among them, several took pains to note that theirs is not the only field typified by what one called “the racism of educated people.”
“Unconscious bias is a problem for academics in general,” said Danny Krashen, an algebraist at Rutgers, who has learned reliable techniques for deflecting race-related skepticism from peers when it arises. Academics are prone to “assume we’re immune” to assorted prejudices, he said, “because we think of ourselves as smarter.”
One is the sheer magnitude of the underrepresentation of black academics in research math. According to the American Mathematical Society, there are 1,769 tenured mathematicians at the math departments of the 50 United States universities that produce the most math Ph.D.s. No one tallies the number of black mathematicians in those departments, but as best I can tell, there are 13. That comes to seven-tenths of 1 percent of the total — perhaps as far as any job classification gets from accurately reflecting the share of black Americans in the general adult population, which stands at 13 percent.
Maybe it seems like splitting already ludicrously fine hairs, but in biomedicine, the share of black scientists who receive major research grants from the National Institutes of Health (1.4 percent) is about twice as high as the share of black mathematicians on the tenured faculty of top United States math departments. The share of employees at Facebook who are black (4 percent) is roughly six times higher; the share of black graduates from United States medical schools (6 percent), nine times higher. Among the film and television agents at Hollywood’s top four talent agencies, according to a recent New York Times article, black agents number in the dozens, which makes their share roughly eight times that of the black mathematicians.
