Faces Like Mine

I spent so much time this summer discussing racism, sexism, and any other (legitimate) "ism" you can think of.  I sat in discussion circles where we learned vocabulary, talked about historical events and motivations that lead to the conditions we have now, and brainstormed on how to enact real and positive changes in our society.  In all of those discussions, the one thing that never failed to be mentioned was representation in the media.

I'd now like to direct your attention to this video:

 When discussing race, there are a few questions that are bound to come up.

• Why are there so few people of color in STEM fields? 
• Why are crime rates among Blacks and Latin@s so high? 
• If white people can realize the American Dream and make successes out of nothing, why can't POCs? 

There are so many historical, political, and economic answers to those questions.  But this blog post is going to focus on one: representation of POCs in the media.

I've heard several times (mostly from older white men) that women and POCs aren't very present in STEM fields because they just aren't interested in STEM.   I'm sorry, what?  You mean to tell me, old white dude, that entire demographics of people are significantly less interested in science and math than you are? I gueeeeeeess that could be it.

OR, could it be that we (the women and POCs) are taught practically from birth that we don't belong in those fields?  My mother is a hardcore feminist, but even she gave me dolls to play with as a young child instead of trucks or toy rocket ships.  I watched Star Trek and Contact and Star Gate and countless other space-themed things growing up.  And you know what I learned from them?  I learned that, unless I was lucky enough to be the ONE black person in a cast of about 100, I didn't really belong in the field. All of that worked together to make it so that I didn't actually believe I could make it as an astronomer until last summer. LAST SUMMER!! That's absurd.

I've talked to people who believe that Black and Latin@ communities have higher crime rates than white communities because there's something about those racial groups that makes the people in them morally inferior to whites.  Now, I feel the need to make it abundantly clear that I'm not condoning (most) crimes.  But (ignoring the fact that Black and Latin@ people are more likely than whites to be persecuted for identical crimes, source here) perhaps there's a reason more Black and Latin@ people feel it's necessary to turn to a life of crime? Could that reason maybe be the fact that most roles in movies and on TV for Black and Latin@ actors revolve around crime?  I think it might be.

And finally, I've literally had people say to my face that white people can work their way out of poverty because they work hard and Black and Latin@ people are lazy.  I don't know about you, but there's just something about characterizing entire races of people like that that doesn't sit right with me. Instead, I wonder if it might have something to do with the fact that most AMerican Dream movies are about white people.  Maybe, if POCs saw people who look like them succeeding just as often as they see whites succeeding, they would start to see it as a possibility.  Because I guarantee that there little Black and Brown children in this country who don't even think success is something they should dare dream about.


This might be the point in the blog post where you say, "But Moiya, what about all those great Black and Brown athletes and singers? Aren't they good role models?" 

Yeah, sure.  Of course there are a few bad apples **cough cough** Chris Brown **cough cough** but for the most part, Black and Brown performers let young Black and Brown people know that they could make it big one day.  There's just one problem:  They're only performers.  I'm not saying that to belittle those professions, but what about the little Black boy who wants to grow up to be a lawyer, or the young Latina girl who wants to be a marine biologist?  Who are their role models? They don't have any, and that's truly heartbreaking. 

I'm not saying that all of the prejudices in the world would disappear if Hollywood and other major film and television institutions suddenly decided to cast POCs, but it sure would make a hell of a difference

Summer Reflections

Another summer internship season has come to a close.  My projects have wrapped up, I've given my presentations and handed in my papers, and I've said my goodbyes. Tho only thing I haven't done -- because the last two weeks have been such a whirlwind of science, presentations, and moving -- is reflect on what this summer has meant to me, so that's what I'm going to do in this blog post.

Science
In case you haven't devoted most of your attention to following my blog and remembering everything I've ever written (and I guess I can't really blame you too much if that's the case), I spent the summer researching the exoplanet system Kepler-186.  I did other things too, mostly regarding galaxies, but this project has a more concrete result, so I'll focus on it.

Kepler-186 is about 500 lightyears (\(\approx\)150pc) away.  The system is made of 5 planets orbiting an M-dwarf star (about half the size and mass of our own sun, but less than 10% the brightness of our sun).  The 5th planet, K-186f, is famous in the exoplanet community.  Hell, it's even famous outside of the astronomer community, as evidenced by the fact that it has its own Wikipedia page.  Its fame comes from the fact that it's practically Earth-sized (\(1.06 R_{Earth}\), according to my calculations) and is just the right distance away from its star that it could hold liquid water. 

There are some downsides to this system being so famous.  Mostly, it just means that any work I do regarding this system won't be new, but that's okay. I wasn't really looking to do completely original research this summer.  I wanted to do research that could form a scientific basis for the book I want to write as my senior thesis, and that's exactly what I did.

The big question I had to ask about K-186f was, "Is it habitable?"  Well, here's my answer in picture form:

 

Obviously, we don't have the technology yet to go and visit this planet, so we can't answer this question with certainty.  All we can do is run the planet through "habitability tests" and see if it could pass. The plot above shows that it (probably) passes the first few tests we put it through. 

The first is the Planet Test.  The dashed line at the bottom indicates the radius of the smallest exoplanet we've ever found (just slightly larger than the moon).  All of the planets are above that line. Yay.

The second is the Composition Test.  There are roughly two types of planets: rocky and gaseous.  Since it's pretty difficult for is to stand on gas, a planet has to be rocky for it to be habitable. The dashed line at the top of the plot shows the radius at which planets tend to stop being rocky, according to Leslie Rogers and her collaborators. All of the planets are below that line. Another yay.

The third and traditionally most important test is the Liquid Water Test. The grey box shows the range of distances from the host star where the temperature on the planet could be just right to hold liquid water.  You can see that K-186f spends its entire orbit (the width of the points represents the range of distances from the star that the planet experiences throughout its orbit, because none of the orbits are perfectly circular) in this Goldilocks Zone. A third yay!  

There are still other tests that we need to put K-186f through, but I'm happy with three yays for now.

Feelings 
I'll admit that I was a little bit jaded at the beginning of the summer. I knew I was going to do an exoplanet project but was convinced that I hated exoplanet research.  I was just as convinced that no group of people would ever be able to compare to the friends I made at NRAO last summer.  And, if I'm being honest with myself and you, I wasn't too happy about being part of a program meant exclusively for Black and Brown students.  It felt like I was cheating or receiving special treatment or admitting that I wasn't good enough to compete with the white kids.  (None of those things were true, of course, but I can't control the thoughts that run that deep in my head.)  It wasn't long before all that jade faded away.

I haven't forgotten about galaxies.  I still think they're really, really cool.  But I now realize that I shouldn't completely write off exoplanets as the most boring area of astronomy research.  I actually think they're, dare I say it, fun to study.

The NRAO kids from last summer are still some of my best friends -- both in and out of the astronomy community -- but I got pretty damn close to the Banneker kids, too.  And as much as I love my NRAO friends, I didn't need them as much as I needed my Banneker friends.  That was actually the best part of this summer. Being around so many talented Black and Brown people and forming such close relationships with all of them was literally a life changing experience.  It alleviated some long-held biases of mine, ended my life-long habit of not feeling "black enough" to spend time with other Black people, and opened my eyes to so so so many issues that exist, hidden, in our society.

I know this blog post wasn't the most well-written.  I had a lot of thoughts and just needed a way to get them out of my head.  The gist of this post, though, is that I needed this summer more than I ever could have realized.