Understanding and Confronting Racism

February 04, 2021

Understanding and Confronting Racism

The Work Begins

In 2020, we saw the start of a global initiative to confront systemic racism. This year, the work continues to call out racism and white supremacy and to institute real change that goes beyond etiquette adjustments. In this month’s eBook, we look at how internal biases are formed, manifestations of institutional racism across society, including the scientific community, and some ideas for a path forward. For further reading on equality, justice and truth, check out these other titles.

Racism: Confronting Injustice, Bias and Inequality

The outcry and eruption of protests following the killing of George Floyd led to a long-overdue reckoning across industries, in politics and in society to confront white supremacy and racial injustice. For Scientific American, part of this reckoning is to make a commitment to improved and wider reporting of racism and to elevate Black and Brown voices. In this eBook, we’ve gathered some of our most important coverage to date, including how systemic racism is linked to COVID-19 and other public health crises, injustice in law enforcement practices and bias in academia and the scientific community.

Women

Women have too long been an afterthought: denied equal opportunity at home and in society and ignored by science. Recent decades brought progress toward some measure of parity, but yawning gaps remain, and some are growing, threatening to undermine everyone’s well-being. In this eBook, we explore research on the scientific and economic implications of gender disparity in the realms of economics, politics, education and health care.

Technology vs. Truth: Deception in the Digital Age

In the digital age, information, both true and false, spreads faster than ever. The same technology that provides access to data across the globe can abet the warping of truth and normalization of lies. In this eBook, we examine the intersection of truth, untruth and technology, including how social media manipulates behavior, technologies such as deepfakes that spread misinformation, the bias inherent in algorithms and more.