3:41pm July 7, 2014

“

I’ve never been female but I have been black my whole life and so let me perhaps offer some insight from that perspective because there are many similar social issues related to access to the equal opportunity that we find in the black community as well as the community of women in a male-dominated—white male-dominated society—and I’ll be brief because I want to get and try and get more questions.

When I look at throughout my life, I’ve known that I’ve wanted to do astrophysics since I was nine years old, that first visit to the [unintelligible] planetarium. I was a little younger than Victor at the time, although he did it before I did. And so, I got to see how the world around me reacted to my expression of these ambitions, and all I can say is the fact that I wanted to be a scientist, an astrophysicist, was hands-down the path of most resistance through the forces of nature, through the forces of society. Any time I expressed this interest, teachers would say “Don’t you want to be an athlete? Don’t you want to—?” I want to become something that was outside of the paradigms of expectation of that, of the people in power. And so, fortunately, my depth of interest in the universe was so deep and so fueled and rich that every one of these curveballs I was throwing in, fences built in front of me and hills that I had to climb, I just reached for more fuel and just kept going.

Now here I am, one, I think, one of the most visible scientists in the land, and I want to look behind me and say “Where are the others who might have been this?” and they’re not there. And I wonder how. Who was the blood on the tracks that I happened to survive, that others did not, simply because of the forces of society that prevented at every turn, at every turn to the point where I have security guards following me as I go through department stores, presuming that I am a, that I’m a thief.

I walked out a store one time and the alarm went off and, so they came running to me. I walked through the gate at the same time a white male walked through the gate, and that guy just walked off with the stolen goods, knowing they would stop me and not him. That’s an interesting sort of exploitation of this—[Woman next to him: “That’s horrible.”] Yeah, that was! People should do that more often, alright?

So, my life experience tells me that when you don’t find blacks in the sciences, you don’t find women in the sciences, I know that these forces are real, and I had to survive them in order to get where I am today. So before we start talking about genetic differences, you got to come up with a system where this equal opportunity, then we can have that conversation.

”

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, in response to a question asked by an older white male member of a panel audience: “What’s up with chicks and science?”

Watch him put this man to shame here.

(via czechov)

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