I am continually riveted by the issues gripping the many members of the Black Diaspora, especially Black Americans. As an engineer, I believe I have a fundamental responsibility to use my technical ability in ways that further educate and serve the Black American community.
Some of the issues I am personally interested in include: the recruitment and retention of talent into programs in engineering and applied science; environmental justice and water quality in the underserved world; Black male (and generally American, for that matter) Ph.D.’s in mathematics, engineering, and applied sciences; and attitudes in Black America towards the redefinition of diversity and affirmative action. Some amazing resources for discussing these topics are: Debra Dickerson’s “The End of Blackness,” John McWhorter’s “Losing the Race”... and more recently, Juan Williams’s “Enough.” For a classic technical analysis of affirmative action, Bowen and Bok’s “The Shape of the River” is unrivaled. Also, I have appreciated a classic by Stephen L. Carter, “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby;” an invaluable discussion of the intellectual, emotional, and professional complexities a Black intellectual faces.
I have been thinking very deeply about whether to maintain this information about my curiosity into US racial issues on my research website. First, I need to consider the impact my words might have on potential colleagues. Second, I rarely find myself in constructive discussions about race (whether or not the discussion is on affirmative action or on the persistence of American racism). Third, I am coming more and more to the conclusion that it is primarily my personal preconceptions of what others might think of me based that most affects my professional life, not so much the reality of others operating according to their own personal race-based heuristics.
I have, however, decided to allow much of this discussion to remain on my website. First, I am a black man, and as an undergraduate, my decision to pursue a PhD was most highly influenced by other black people who held PhDs. While my experience may have been uniquely colored by my Howard matriculation, I suspect this feeling is still held by others who may consider an engineering MS or PhD. [In fact, one of the most prominent influences on my thinking was Dr. Greg Carr, a professor whom I never personally had or met, and only heard seconhand. To get a feel for his ethos, Karen Hunter's YouTube channel has a show "In Class with Carr" so you can experience him too!] My actual professors though, were just as inspirational, including my advisor Dr. Kimberly Jones, Dr. Tori Rhoulac-Smith (now @NSF), Dr. Charles Glass, Dr. Stephen Arhin, Dr. Robert Efimba, and Dr. Taft Broome (whom I did not personally have class with, but who did introduce me to Carnegie Mellon, EPP, and Prof. Garrick Louis who was also an HU Bison soccer/Civil Engineering almnus). My second reason for keeping this information is because of my own personal experience looking for potential role models, not necessarily mentors, in the advanced technical areas I was considering towards the end of my undergraduate degree: environmental engineering and public policy, or environmental law. To this day, I have come across perhaps a handful of other black students (American or not) pursuing PhDs in environmental engineering. I have also come across only a handful of black professors in the same field. When I was considering environmental law, I found no black environmental law scholars at any of the programs to which I considered applying. While my decision to pursue engineering instead of law had absolutely nothing to do with race, I was deeply distressed by what I perceived as a tendency for our most visible intellectuals to neglect mathematical and technical fields.
Finally, while growing up, I had not met any adults who were even engineers, black or otherwise. I had no clue what engineering was, and remember only knowing about such professions as medicine, law, politics, and sales and marketing. I remember only seriously understanding what engineering was after receiving a University of Southern California viewbook in the mail (I still keep this viewbook in my home office). If I could wish anything different about my childhood, it would be a better understanding of the type of things engineers and scientists actually do with their knowledge. (I mean, at times I sit and ponder how different my environmental engineering studies would have been if I’d had a better working intuition of physics and chemistry as a high school student in those AP classes...Would I have gotten to this point as an atmospheric chemist? a geophysicist? or, most likely, a chemical engineer?) Thus, I keep this page here to announce my availability as a resource.
So, in summary I am astonished by the lack of black Americans, and the decreasing number of Americans generally, who aspire to engineering and science at the PhD level. More importantly, while race is not so important for practice in these fields, I know there are others like me who would like role models in the area. Hopefully, I will become good enough to be a resource for someone else.