Although the US debate has focused largely on systemic racism in the context of slavery and civil rights, the flashpoints in the United Kingdom are imperialism and colonialism, which involved white Europeans exploiting other ethnic groups, especially through the slave trade and oppression of Indigenous people.
Scientific ideas and institutions were intimately connected to that legacy; in London, the capital of the British Empire, that is particularly apparent. Most obviously, Imperial College, an amalgamation of several earlier institutions, founded in 1907 — when the Empire was at its height, covering nearly one-quarter of Earth’s total land area — is named for it.
Imperial is one of a handful of UK scientific institutions examining racism in their own histories, and how to acknowledge and redress its legacy. Other institutions and scientific departments around the globe are seeking to recast curricula and address racism’s influence in shaping their fields.
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The evidence that racism and its attendant inequalities blight science today as much as they do wider society is irrefutable. “We have fewer than five Black faculty members at Imperial, out of about 1,600,” says [Stephen] Curry. But the wider scientific community is divided on how to confront those issues. Some say that renaming buildings is an irrelevant distraction from the more urgent and important task of improving diversity in the scientific workforce today.
