Amy Harmon

The forum, one of the many on Reddit, featured a feed of jokes and memes and commentary circulated on social media by black people, and comment threads where discussions could unfold. A post parodied the discomfort many white people seem to feel with the phrase “black lives matter.” Participants riffed on rapper Kanye West’s suggestion that slavery had lasted too long to have been involuntary. Conversations about topics in the news and personal encounters with racial bias were interspersed with sometimes off-color humor about sex, romance and lifestyle advice.

Given that the vast majority of Reddit users are white, no one seemed to be under the illusion that only black people would weigh in. As one of the forum’s moderators recalled, the thought was that the white users who held sway in nearly all of Reddit’s 157,100 other communities, known as subreddits, would see no need to dominate this one.

It can be difficult to tell a person’s race on Reddit. Its several hundred million users are known to one another only by their screen names, without the profile pictures and biographies that are typical of other social media sites. That can be a boon to free speech, say proponents of the policy. It also encourages hate speech, detractors maintain.

In the case of the Reddit forum, which was called Black People Twitter, some of the comments appeared to be more an attempt to mock black culture than to appreciate it.

Many black users came to believe that white users were pretending to be black to give their unpopular opinions more credibility. Some of the posts casually dropped racial slurs. Others repeated anti-black stereotypes about crime, parenting and intelligence. Beyoncé was disparaged.

“These people are white,” said Tony Hinderman, 23, a black actor in Chicago. “Black people love Beyoncé. There is nothing to not love about her.”

The weight of unseen white opinion also made itself felt through the Reddit ranking system, in which posts and comments rise or fall in visibility based on users clicking on the “up” or “down” arrows next to each.

A comment on a post about a first-generation black college student’s entry to Harvard Medical School — “you’ll be attending thanks to affirmative action” — received hundreds of “upvotes” before it was removed by a moderator. In conversations about police violence, allusions to “black on black crime,” carrying the false implication that black people break the law more often, would float to the top.

A discussion meant to be a respite from the racial tensions out in the world began to mirror them.

“It was like a constant form of gaslighting,” said Wesley Moreno, 30, a black information technology professional who until recently served as a moderator of the forum.

‘Isn’t This Just Racist?’

The first moderator of Black People Twitter was a white Reddit user who had become enamored of the candid perspectives on culture and current events that were circulating among black Twitter users and started posting screenshots of them in late 2014. These days the subreddit is run by a multiracial group of more than two dozen moderators, many of whom are black.

Like all Reddit moderators, they perform tasks like approving posts and banning users; they work without pay, in exchange for mostly free rein to run their subreddit.

The forum grew rapidly to become one of the 50 most active on Reddit, according to Pushshift.io, with tens of thousands of weekly participants and more than half a million readers a day.

But by last spring, it was having increasing problems with violations of its “bad-faith participation” rules. The moderators found themselves shutting down dozens of conversations each week. So they decided on a bold change, one that has unleashed waves of outrage across Reddit for months.

The most heated comment threads, they announced, would give priority to nonwhite participants. Anyone who wished to participate would need to send the moderators a photograph of their forearm, proving they were not white.

Complaints flowed in — from proponents of far-right ideologies, avowed liberals and many people in between. “Isn’t this just racist?” read one.

The forearm photos, according to the controversial new guidelines, had to include commenters’ user names written out by hand, as well as time stamps to make clear they were recent.

“People are complaining, but I have yet to figure out a better way to do it,” a black moderator whose user name is Nasjere told a reporter as he chipped away at a backlog of thousands of forearm photographs one recent afternoon, using various methods to root out fakers.

Brown Forearms, White Fury

Moderators, most of whom declined to give their real names, reported receiving significant abuse since they began enforcing the policy.

One user sent a stock photograph of two black men hanging from a noose, with the message, “Let me and my brother in we are both black.” Others compared the exclusion of white people from some conversations to Jim Crow-era laws that relegated black people to second-class status in all of civic life.

There was considerable discussion about whether a photograph could demonstrate a person’s blackness, given the wide variety of skin colors among African Americans and the complex social meanings of race that extend beyond skin color.

And the proliferation of consumer DNA tests, which break down geographic ancestry to precise percentages, prompted one critic to query:

“My mom is 1% Ghanaian, meaning I’m .5%. Does that count?”

Others said it was the height of hypocrisy for a forum full of discussions on combating racial injustice to exclude people on the basis of race. “Ever heard of fighting fire with fire?” asked the user swiper33. Another user, Sunny1296, wrote, “Confused how it’s okay in 2019 to exclude over skin tone when we’re all the same underneath.”

Under the new rules, comments are initially open to all. But nonwhite participants are allowed to continue contentious discussions after they are closed to white users. Those threads are labeled “Country Club,” a term the moderators said they chose in reference to a place where black people in America have historically found themselves excluded and often still do.

When participants who have been verified as black post a comment on any thread, a check mark now appears next to their username. Hispanic, Asian and other nonwhite people can also be added to a list of approved users, though they do not get a check mark.

There is one way that white people can get on the list as well: Those with a history of thoughtful participation in the subreddit can write to the moderators about what white privilege means to them.

“We wanted to find a way to allow actual black people to be heard without being drowned out,” said a black moderator whose Reddit user name is MGLLN. “We had no idea it would blow up this site.”

Welcome to the Country Club

The idea for the Country Club threads had its genesis in an April Fools’ prank that was meant to last just a few days.

Over the previous year, the moderators had banished thousands of obvious provocateurs. Of the many users they suspected of pretending to be black, they had caught a few by researching their posts elsewhere on Reddit: “As an African American male I would love me some Wendy’s,” one user who turned out to be white wrote about the fast-food President Donald Trump served to a championship college football team at the White House. “Who the hell calls themselves a ‘male?’ ” moderator IceBrotha replied.

More aggravating to some of the moderators were the seemingly well-meaning white participants who appeared to think their questions about police violence — questions like “Don’t you think it would have been different if he hadn’t resisted?” — were original or illuminating. Or those who thought it was important, in discussing the need for more black doctors, to suggest that it was best to “teach your kids to look up to people regardless of skin color.”

So this spring, the moderators decided to use April Fools’ Day to make a pointed joke about their frustrations, announcing that “we are now restricting access on this sub for black folks only.”

It was the influx of photographs featuring forearms in all shades of brown that persuaded them to make the joke rules permanent.

Some black users scrawled their screen names directly on their skin. Others wrote them on paper. A handful cast aside their anonymity and sent photographs of their faces. One sent a picture of his whole family because he was light-skinned and wanted to prove he was black. Moderators worked around the clock on the first day to verify users.

And amid the ample outrage, there was also some bliss. One user, Bigg-Tech, received the black check-mark icon that signified acceptance and responded by posting a joyful dancing GIF from “Soul Train.”

This article originally appeared in

Discussing Blackness on Reddit? Photograph Your Forearm First

It was meant to be a destination on the internet where black people could let down their guard.

Answer to a Racial Quandary: Show What's Up Your Sleeve

There are faculty advisers on El’s theater crew who balk at using “they” for one person; classmates at El’s public school on the outskirts of Boston who insist El can’t be “multiple people”; and commenters on El’s social media feeds who dismiss nonbinary gender identities like androgyne (a combination of masculine and feminine), agender (the absence of gender) and gender-fluid (moving between genders) as lacking a basis in biology.

Even for El’s supportive parents, conceiving of gender as a multidimensional sprawl has not been so easy to grasp. Nor has El’s suggestion that everyone state their pronouns gained much traction.

So last summer, when the Massachusetts State Legislature became one of the first in the nation to consider a bill to add an “X” option for nonbinary genders to the “M” and “F” on the state driver’s license, El, 17, was less surprised than some at the maneuver that effectively killed it.

Beyond the catchall “X,” Rep. James J. Lyons Jr. (he/him), a Republican, had proposed that the bill should be amended to offer drivers 29 other gender options, including “pangender,” “two-spirit” and “genderqueer.” Rather than open the requisite debate on each term, leaders of the Democratic-controlled House shelved the measure.

“He articulated an anxiety that many people, even folks from the left, have: that there’s this slippery slope of identity, and ‘Where will it stop?’” said Ev Evnen (they/them), director of the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition, which is championing a new version of the bill.

As the first sizable group of Americans to openly identify as neither only male nor only female has emerged in recent years, their requests for recognition have been met with reservations that often cross partisan lines. For their part, some nonbinary people suggest that concerns about authenticity and grammar sidestep thornier questions about the culture’s long-standing limits on how gender is supposed to be felt and expressed.

“Nonbinary gender identity can be complicated,” said Evnen, 31. “It’s also threatening to an order a lot of people have learned how to navigate.”

And with bills to add a nonbinary marker to driver’s licenses moving through at least six legislatures this session, the expansive conception of gender that many teenagers can trace to middle-school lunch tables is being scrutinized on a new scale.

A Learning Curve

The wave of proposed gender-neutral legislation has prompted debate over whether extending legal recognition to a category of people still unknown to many Americans could undermine support for other groups vulnerable to discrimination. It has also highlighted how disorienting it can be to lose the gendered cues, like pronouns, names, appearance and mannerisms, that shape so much of social interaction.

Over the past few months, lawmakers have sought — not always successfully — to use the singular “they” when introducing nonbinary constituents who have appeared to testify. The elected officials have listened to tutorials on the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity (the former is who you go to bed with, the latter is who you go to bed as); to pleas for compassion from parents who have learned to refer to their children as “my kid” rather than “son” or “daughter”; and to why being called by binary pronouns feels, as Kayden Reff (they/them), 15, of Bethesda, Maryland, put it in testimony read by their mother, “as though ice is being poured down my back.”

“I’ve always been a liberal Democrat; it’s not like these issues are foreign to me,” said state Rep. Michael Winkler (he/him), 68, of Vernon, Connecticut, who attended a hearing on gender-neutral identification state documents this spring. “But I’m still capable of being educated.”

Some of the antipathy toward nonbinary identities may reflect a generational divide. More than a third of Americans now in their teens and early 20s know someone who uses gender-neutral pronouns, according to a recent survey by Pew Research — more than people in their later 20s and 30s, double the number of those in their 40s, and triple the number of those in their 50s and 60s. Sixty percent of the teenagers surveyed told Pew that forms asking about a person’s gender should include options other than “man” and “woman.”

“Possibly it’s an age issue,” said Jocelyn Doan (she/her), 39, a longtime advocate for progressive causes in Hawaii who struggled with whether to support the gender-neutral license bill in her state. “I want to respect their challenges, but the use of ‘their’ for a single person is making me crazy.”

Objections to the bills have also been raised by social conservatives, like state Sen. J.B. Jennings (he/him) of Maryland, who made a distinction in public comments between transgender people who transition from male to female or vice versa, and those who identify as nonbinary. “They’re either going one way or the other, they’re not stuck in the middle,” he said. Jennings suggested that the license would be inaccurate if it listed a gender other than male or female. His argument was echoed by the California Family Council when that state became the first to adopt gender-neutral documents as law in 2017: “It advances a falsehood that being male or female or no gender at all is a choice each person must make, not a fact to celebrate and accept,” said Jonathan Keller, the group’s president.

But other opponents, like the Women’s Liberation Front, an advocacy group that has submitted testimony on so-called “Gender X” bills in several states, argue that bolstering the nonbinary category will harm people who face discrimination and violence precisely because they are born with female anatomy. “To deny the reality of sex means we’re not able to name, address, and fix systemic sex-based oppression and exploitation,” said Kara Dansky (she/her) of the group’s Maryland chapter.

And a state agency in Hawaii that tracks the status of women took the opposite tack, backing an alternative proposal for a limited-use ID bearing no gender marker that was introduced in addition to a bill to add the “X.”

“The state does not have a legitimate interest” in identifying residents based on their gender, the agency’s testimony asserted. That bill did not advance, said its sponsor, state Sen. Karl Rhoads (he/him), probably because federal law requires air travelers to carry identification that includes a gender marker, and in the island state, “the only way to get anywhere is flying.”

‘No Right Way to Be a Girl’

Proponents of adding a gender-neutral option to state identification documents say it would remove a form of discrimination against nonbinary people by providing them with the means to carry identification that matches their identity. Many also hope it will lend legitimacy to a paradigm that stands to liberate people of all genders from deep-rooted social norms that penalize women for being assertive and men for showing emotion.

“The gender binary is a system of control that a lot of nonbinary people are invested in destroying, and this is a step toward that,” said Jamie Grace Alexander (they/them or she/her), a 21-year-old college student who helped to craft testimony on the Maryland bill for the Baltimore Transgender Alliance.

Some parents of nonbinary youths who testified at hearings acknowledged that understanding their child’s identity was a challenge at first. “Sweetie, there’s no right way to be a girl,” Sara Collina (she/her), a gender studies professor in Takoma Park, Maryland, recalled saying when her child first confided that they had renounced the gender they were given at birth.

But several nonbinary teenagers emphasized that they were not looking for a way to be a girl or boy that stretched conventional definitions. Their gender identity was a visceral feeling, they said, not a political choice — and one that could bring with it social ostracism.

“I wouldn’t wish to not be nonbinary,” Collina’s teenager (they/them), who did not want to be named, said. “But it is harder.”

Scholars say that nonbinary genders have existed across history and cultures. Young Americans may now be embracing them in larger numbers, they say, because the increased visibility of people who have transitioned from one binary gender to the other suggests that there are more than two positions to occupy.

“Such fluidity necessarily raises the question for all of us,” wrote Barbara Risman (she/her), a sociologist at the University of Illinois who has studied nonbinary youths, “why must our lives be organized by the legal and bureaucratic binary system that relegates everyone to one of two categories based originally on genitalia observed at birth?”

Wave of Recognition

Perhaps also because some critical mass has been reached, nine state motor vehicles bureaus have recently added the “X” option to driver’s licenses without involving the legislature.

Several other jurisdictions, including New York City, Oregon, New Jersey and New Mexico, have also begun to allow people to change the gender on their birth certificate to “X.” The nation’s major airlines have announced that they will allow passengers to identify as an “undisclosed” or “unspecified” gender when booking tickets.

And in a decision that has been appealed by the U.S. government, a federal judge in Colorado ruled that the State Department’s requirement that applicants choose either “M” or “F” on a passport application is not an acceptable basis on which to withhold a passport from Dana Zzyym (they/them), a military veteran who sued the department in 2014 after their request for a gender-neutral passport was denied. “This is not a matter of self-expression,” the government has argued. “This is a government form.”

But the current crop of gender-neutral license bills, if signed into law, would amount to the first wave of legal recognition for nonbinary identities, legal experts said. “We didn’t want this to be just an administrative change,” said Jen Jenkins (they/them), a law student at the University of Hawaii who provided research for the bill passed by Hawaii’s Legislature last month. “We want it to last.”

In some states, the bills have been introduced at the urging of parents who know that social affirmation can reduce the elevated risk of suicide and depression for gender-nonconforming children.

“The gist was, their kids didn’t feel the IDs available to them reflected who they were,” said Gerri Cannon (she/her), a state representative who sponsored ID bills in New Hampshire after receiving calls from concerned parents.

Nonbinary teens themselves have also petitioned for a third gender on state identity documents.

Ed Luiggi (they/them), 17, president of an after-school club for gender-nonconforming students, skipped school to testify before the Maryland Senate’s Judicial Proceedings Committee in Annapolis earlier this year. “My heart was racing and I was sweating a bit,” they said. It was at the same hearing that Lisa Reff (she/her), a lawyer, read the statement that her 15-year-old, Kayden, had labored to make relatable: “I wanted it to be down-to-earth but I also wanted it to sound proper,” Kayden said in a text.

And the Massachusetts bill originated with a letter written by El Martinez to their state representatives: “I am planning to take driving lessons in the fall and I would be ecstatic to have a more neutral option,” it read. And this time around, El has sought to assure lawmakers that the “X” would encompass all nonconforming genders. “The ‘X,’” El told members of the Legislature’s transportation committee in late March, “is a symbol.”

In Hawaii and Colorado, gender-neutral license bills have recently reached the desks of their respective governors. Maryland’s will become law, the state’s Republican governor, Larry Hogan, said last week, without his signature, effective Oct. 1.

Similar measures are still under consideration in New Hampshire, New York and Connecticut. The Massachusetts bill has passed the Senate. It is now under review in the House.

This article originally appeared in <a id="c3285b9e-9440-3627-aa64-eba4ffa24358" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/us/nonbinary-drivers-licenses.html">The New York Times</a>.

Which Box Do You Check? Some States Are Offering a Nonbinary Option

BOSTON — Ever since El Martinez started asking to be called by the gender-neutral pronouns “they/them” in the ninth grade, they have fielded skepticism in a variety of forms and from a multitude of sources about what it means to identify as nonbinary.

Which box do you check? Some states are offering a nonbinary option

But when the American Civil Liberties Union announced a legal challenge last week to one such law in Ohio, there was no mention of the word “heartbeat” in the news release, which referred to the law instead as “a ban on almost all abortions.” In Georgia, Stacey Abrams, a Democrat who narrowly lost the governor’s race last year, called the measure in her state a “forced pregnancy bill.” A sign at a protest against the law in Atlanta this week turned the idea into a slogan: “NO FORCED BIRTHS.”

The battle over abortion has long been shaped by language. After opponents of abortion created the “pro-life” phrase in the 1960s to emphasize what they saw as the humanity of the fetus, supporters of abortion cast themselves as “pro-choice” to stress a woman’s right to make decisions about her body. In the mid-1990s, the term “partial-birth abortion,” originated by the anti-abortion group National Right to Life, helped rally public opinion against a late-term abortion procedure. Abortion rights activists countered with “Trust Women.”

But the stakes attached to the language of abortion are especially high, activists on both sides say, at a time when the Supreme Court is seen as likely to chip away at the right to an abortion established in 1973 by Roe v. Wade.

It was no accident, for instance, that Ohio’s leading anti-abortion group, Ohio Right to Life, invoked the term “heartbeat” eight times in 300 words in a news release welcoming the ACLU’s legal challenge, said the group’s president, Mike Gonidakis. The idea that life begins at conception, an axiom for many anti-abortion activists, Gonidakis said, does not have the same capacity to mobilize “the average person on the street” as the symbolism of a heart.

“When we say, ‘Protect babies with a beating heart,’ we’ve found a way to overcome that tsunami of messaging from Planned Parenthood,” Gonidakis said of the prominent abortion rights group. “The power of words and repeating those words over and over again helps steer the debate and move the needle in your favor.”

As opponents of abortion push the term “fetal heartbeat,” abortion rights activists are trying to galvanize support by focusing on the impact the recently passed bans can have on people’s lives. On a culture-war battleground where many Americans have already chosen a side, experts say, effective messaging can be the catalyst that mobilizes people on either one — in addition to reaching the undecided.

“‘Heartbeat’ bills are obviously supposed to pull at your heartstrings, and the left is coming back with terms like ‘punishing women’ and ‘forced pregnancy,’” said Mary Ziegler, a legal historian at Florida State University and the author of “After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate.”

“The rhetoric seems to be getting more and more extreme on both sides,” she added.

Abortion rights advocates say their own polling and analysis has shown that their messaging has been overly focused on concepts like the right to choose and protecting women’s privacy, which were the foundation of 1970s and 1980s-era activism aimed at right-leaning voters opposed to government intervention in people’s lives. Even the term “abortion,” they say, was stigmatized in the late 1990s with the “safe, legal and rare” tagline, used by President Bill Clinton to describe the Democrats’ policy outlook on abortion. Describing abortion as needing to be rare implied incorrectly, in the eyes of advocates, that there was something inherently wrong with having an abortion.

Now, individual stories of abortion are increasingly being aired under hashtags like #ShoutYourAbortion and #YouKnowMe, and the goal among many activist groups is to use more straightforward language that shifts the focus from the fetus to the person who is pregnant.

“We don’t use the term ‘anti-choice’ anymore,” said Destiny Lopez, a co-director of All Above All, a reproductive rights advocacy group. “That’s a euphemism that is outdated. We say anti-abortion, and what is the impact of being anti-abortion? It’s forcing someone to remain pregnant.”

Opponents of abortion have long stressed what they believe is the humanity of a fetus, protesting at rallies and in front of abortion clinics with signs that read “Abortion Stops a Beating Heart.” In some states, people are required to view ultrasound images before getting an abortion.

“Fetal heartbeat” is a term often used by obstetricians with patients as a shorthand — but one many doctors never expected would become so politicized.

One criticism of the “heartbeat” language, abortion rights supporters say, is that it obscures the science of how an embryo develops. What is detected on an ultrasound taken early in pregnancy, obstetricians say, is an electrical pulse in a group of cells the size of a pencil tip. To function as a heart would require further development of its structure, as well as a neurological system, among other things.

“This is nothing like what we would think of as a four-chambered heart,” said Sarah Horvath, a family planning fellow with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists who performs abortions. “The scientific words are getting conflated with a term that has emotional significance.”

Even when a law is described as banning abortions at six or eight weeks, some abortion rights advocates worry there is the potential for confusion. Doctors measure the start of pregnancy from the first day of a woman’s last menstrual period, which is usually two weeks before conception. As a result, some of the new laws would ban abortion as early as two weeks after a missed period, before many women realize they are pregnant.

But arguing on scientific or technical grounds has not proved especially effective for abortion rights supporters in the past.

Medical explanations of the term “partial birth abortion” in the late 1990s — a time when the number of Americans who said that abortion should be legal under all circumstances had dropped, to about 1 in 4 from 1 in 3 — did not prevent a ban of the procedure under federal law in 2003. The phrase refers to a later-term abortion procedure known as dilation and extraction.

Anti-abortion activists have also successfully pushed for bans on a procedure used in the vast majority of second-trimester abortions by labeling it “dismemberment abortion.” Doctors call the procedure a dilation and evacuation. The bans are in effect in two states, West Virginia and Mississippi.

“Medical procedures are not familiar to a lay audience, people don’t like to think about them, and they are hard to explain on a bumper sticker,” said Carole Joffe, a sociologist who studies abortion politics at the University of California, San Francisco. “That has put the pro-choice movement at a disadvantage.”

Slogans about keeping abortions “safe and legal” are fine, said Andrea Miller, an abortion rights supporter and president of the National Institute for Reproductive Health, but fail to evoke the emotion that opponents of abortion rights have managed to unleash. “When you zoom out from the legalese and you ground it in real people’s lives, you see greater support and mobilization.”

Gonidakis, of Ohio Right to Life, said he had taken note of some of the new terminology being floated by abortion rights proponents, like the #StopTheBans hashtag and references to “forced birth.”

“I’m not saying it’s not powerful,” he said. “I’m just saying, saving a baby with a beating heart is more powerful.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="b973b80d-fa24-3dd2-a3fd-2d6f74c5c5d0" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/us/fetal-heartbeat-forced-pregnancy.html">The New York Times</a>.

Abortion Debate Is a Battle, and Language Is the Turf

The new laws that prohibit abortion as early as the sixth week of pregnancy have been called “heartbeat” legislation by supporters, a reference to the flickering pulse that can be seen on ultrasound images of a developing embryo.

Abortion debate is a battle, and language is the turf

<h1>BALTIMORE — It was not an overt incident of racism that prompted Edray Goins, an African-American mathematician in the prime of his career, to abandon his tenured position on the faculty of a major research university last year.</h1>

The hostilities he perceived were subtle, the signs of disrespect unspoken.

There was the time he was brushed aside by the leaders of his field when he approached with a math question at a conference. There were the reports from students in his department at Purdue University that a white professor had warned them not to work with him.

One of only perhaps a dozen black mathematicians among nearly 2,000 tenured faculty members in the nation’s top 50 math departments, Goins frequently asked himself whether he was right to factor race into the challenges he faced.

That question from a senior colleague on his area of expertise, directed to someone else? His department’s disinclination to nominate him to the committee that controls hiring? The presumption, by a visiting scholar, that he was another professor’s student?

What about the chorus of chortling that erupted at a lunch with white and Asian colleagues when, in response to his suggestion that they invite underrepresented minorities as seminar speakers, one feigned confusion and asked if Australians qualified.

“I can give you instance after instance,” Goins, 46, said as he navigated the annual meeting of the nation’s mathematicians in Baltimore last month. “But even for myself I question, ‘Did it really happen that way, or am I blowing it out of proportion? Is this really about race?’ ”

The ‘Leaky Pipeline’

Black Americans receive about 7 percent of the doctoral degrees awarded each year across all disciplines, but they have received just 1 percent of those granted over the last decade in mathematics. Like many who see in that disparity a large pool of untapped talent, Goins has long been preoccupied with fixing what is known as the “leaky pipeline.”

Redress the racial disparities that exist at every level of math education, the logic goes, and racial diversity among those who grapple with math’s biggest problems will follow.

To that end, Goins delivers guest lectures to underrepresented middle and high school math students, organizes summer research programs for underrepresented math undergraduates, and heads an advocacy group that was formed in 1969 after the American Mathematical Society, the professional association for research mathematicians, rejected a proposal to address the dearth of black and Hispanic members.

Goins’ own journey through the pipeline was propelled by a magnet program that offered Advanced Placement calculus for the first time at his majority-black south Los Angeles high school. In 1990, having aced the AP calculus BC exam, he became the first student from the school ever to gain admission to the prestigious California Institute of Technology, just 20 miles away.

The 10 black students in his class were the largest group Caltech had ever enrolled, he learned when he wrote a paper on the history of being black at Caltech. Only three of the others graduated with him four years later.

Most of his classmates, Goins quickly realized, had arrived with math training that went far beyond his own. In his freshman year, he called his high school calculus teacher for help with the homework. In his sophomore year, he watched from his dormitory television as the 1992 Los Angeles riots erupted near his mother’s home. But he also came to excel in applied math, which traffics in real-world problems, and, later, to immerse himself in “pure math,” which seeks to elucidate the questions intrinsic to mathematics itself.

Goins won two math prizes at Caltech, and in 1999 he received a Ph.D. from Stanford’s math department — one of three African-Americans who have ever done so, according to an informal count by William Massey, a Princeton professor who received the second. In 2004, after holding a visiting scholar position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and another at Harvard, Goins joined the faculty of Purdue in West Lafayette, Indiana.

“You are such an inspiration to us all,” Talitha Washington, a black mathematician who is now a tenured professor at Howard University, wrote on his Facebook page when he received tenure in the spring of 2010.

Yet having emerged at the far end of the pipeline, Goins found himself unwilling to stay. Last fall, in a move almost unheard-of in the academic ecosystem, he traded his full professor post at Purdue, where federal resources are directed at tackling science’s unsolved problems and training a new generation of Ph.D.s, for a full professorship at Pomona, a liberal arts college outside Los Angeles that prioritizes undergraduate teaching.

“Edray,” he recalled one colleague telling him, “you are throwing your career away.”

In an essay that has been widely shared over the last year, Goins sought to explain himself. He extolled the virtues of teaching undergraduates and vowed to continue his research. But he also gave voice to a lament about the loneliness of being black in a profession marked by extraordinary racial imbalance.

“I am an African-American male,” Goins wrote in a blog published by the American Mathematical Society. “I have been the only one in most of the universities I’ve been to — the only student or faculty in the mathematics department.

“To say that I feel isolated,” he continued, “is an understatement.”

Experiences similar to Goins’ are reflected in recent studies by academic institutions on attrition among underrepresented minorities and women across many disciplines. Interviews with departing faculty of color indicated that “improving the climate” would be key to retaining them, according to a 2016 University of Michigan report. Officials at Columbia, which has spent over $85 million since 2005 to increase faculty diversity, with disappointing results, suggested last fall that progress would hinge partly on majority-group faculty members adjusting their behavior.

“In most cases, faculty are not consciously or purposely trying to make colleagues feel unwelcome or excluded,” said Maya Tolstoy, dean of Columbia’s arts and science faculty. “But it happens.”

And at the recent math meeting, where Goins delivered a keynote address titled “A Dream Deferred: 50 Years of Blacks in Mathematics,” his presence kindled conversations about racial slights in the math world. The presumption of competence and authority that seems to be automatically accorded other mathematicians, for instance, is often not applied to them, several black mathematicians said.

“Who do they make eye contact with? Not you,” said Nathaniel Whitaker, an African-American who heads the department of mathematics and statistics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Michael Young, a mathematician at Iowa State University, said he almost gave up on graph theory a few years ago after an encounter with some of the leaders of the field at a math institute at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“A couple of them were at a board writing something,” he recalled. “I went over and asked, ‘What are you guys working on?’

“We’re too far in to catch you up,” he said he was told.

The ethos characterized as meritocracy, some said, is often wielded as a seemingly unassailable excuse for screening out promising minority job candidates who lack a name-brand alma mater or an illustrious mentor. Hiring committees that reflect the mostly white and Asian makeup of most math departments say they are compelled to “choose the ‘best,’ ” said Ryan Hynd, a black mathematician at the University of Pennsylvania, “even though there’s no guideline about what ‘best’ is.”

And Ken Ono, a prominent mathematician in Goins’ field, number theory, and a vice president of the mathematical society, said that a part of Goins was always likely to be wondering, “'Do they see me as the token African-American, or do they see me as a number theorist?’ ”

“And honestly, to tell the truth, I think that answer would vary from individual to individual,” Ono said.

Most tenured math faculty members at research institutions do not leave, regardless of their race. “I’ve done well and am really enjoying myself,” wrote Chelsea Walton, a black mathematician at the University of Illinois, in a comment on Goins’ blog post.

But because role models of the same race are seen as critical to luring talented students from underrepresented minorities into a Ph.D. program, it is a blow to lose even one, Ono said. For the representation of African-Americans in math departments to reach parity with their 13 percent share of the country’s adult population, their ranks would have to increase more than tenfold. (The number of women, also notoriously low among math faculty, would need to triple.) “It’s a loss to our mathematical community that Edray may never advise graduate students again,” said Ono, who is Japanese-American.

An Ambitious Gambit

Goins’ isolation, he himself was the first to note, was also forged by an early failure. Near the end of his studies at Stanford, he set out to prove a conjecture using techniques suggested by the solution to a 350-year-old problem, Fermat’s last theorem, which had rocked the mathematical world a few years earlier.

It was an ambitious undertaking whose success would probably have snagged him job offers from the most elite math departments in the country. But the conjecture was grounded in a highly technical area populated by the field’s top talent. And despite guidance from Richard Taylor, a white mathematician then at Harvard who had assisted in solving Fermat’s theorem, Goins was unable to publish the paper he produced four years later.

Several mathematicians familiar with Goins’ efforts said they did not see racial discrimination as playing a role. It is not all that unusual, they said, for such an ambitious undertaking to end in an unsatisfying result. But it also can require deep reserves of self-confidence and a professional network to bounce back.

Goins’ colleagues at Purdue said his receipt of tenure and subsequent promotion to full professor signaled the university’s willingness to overlook a sparse research portfolio in light of his extraordinary work with undergraduates, as well as the summer programs he organized for minority students.

“While these areas are not necessarily ‘traditional’ markers for excellence at major research universities, they were valued,” Greg Buzzard, head of Purdue’s math department, who is white, said in a statement.

But Goins said he was looking for something else.

“I just never really felt respected,” he said.

At the math meeting last month, Goins’ essay was not immune from criticism.

Some black mathematicians questioned the utility of dwelling on perceived slights, many of which are unconscious or made out of ignorance.

Some who know Goins noted his sensitivity. Insults that others might shrug off, they said, might stick with him.

For Bobby Wilson, a black mathematician at the University of Washington, offenses related to race “just start to wash over you.” He added: “That doesn’t mean it’s right or good.”

Over dinner one evening, another black mathematician told Goins that he was worried that his blog account of the difficulties he faced might discourage black graduate students who hope to pursue careers in academic research.

Maybe, it was suggested, he should have kept it to himself.

Goins, taking that in, was silent. His reply came only the next day.

“I didn’t write it to tell people what should happen,” he said. “I wrote it to tell people what could happen.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="6f5f3288-0bd3-4452-b633-fb6d765fa152" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/18/us/edray-goins-black-mathematicians.html">The New York Times</a>.

A Black Scholar's Lonely Trek at the Top of the Math World

The hostilities he perceived were subtle, the signs of disrespect unspoken.

A black scholar's lonely trek at the top of the math world

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