Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: The political questions of science and technology (ep403)
“I think the bigger question is not necessarily about physics, but generally speaking, about how we culturally engage with science, the role of science in our communities, how it shapes our mindset, and what our mindset about science is.”
Joining us in this episode is theoretical physicist Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, whose research on small-scale particles points us to a large, cosmic picture. From particle physics and astrophysics to astronomy and Black feminist science studies, Chanda’s work spans a wide range of disciplines, practices, and texts.
Named as one of 10 people who helped shape science in 2020 as part of Nature’s 10, Chanda also leads in expanding awareness of and unpacking racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression that continue to govern scientific scholarship, particularly the field of physics. Through her deep love of math and physics as a form of storytelling, Chanda is committed, in her own words to “understanding the biggest story there is: the origin and history of the universe”—histories stemming from pluri-cultural lenses.
Tune in to this episode as Prescod-Weinstein talks through some of the themes explored in her latest award-winning book, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, pointing to the entanglement of Western scientific institutions tethered to specific cultural and historical hegemonies. Shining a light on the political nature of technology, she problematizes supremacist ways of knowledge-seeking and questions universalized visions of advancement—including the idea that expanding the accessibility of broadband internet connection to every community on Earth is a shared and necessary goal of inclusivity.
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Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited and are open invitations to dive deeper into each resource or topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: We're in the middle of this major political process in the particle physics community where we're talking about and making arguments to people in positions of power about what the future of particle physics should be. A big site of contention right now is that neutrino physics has gotten a lot of emphasis over the last decade. The experiment that has gotten particular support ended up having major cost overruns. So this was a neutrino experiment called Dune.
Because of an appointment I have, I can't explain any of my kind of my positions on that, my political positions on that situation. But to connect it back to your question about my mom, when I was in high school, my mom was like, neutrinos are neat, neutrinos are interesting. And I was like, 'Whatever, I don't remember reading much about them in Stephen Hawking's book, so they can't possibly be that interesting.'
Fast forward, and neutrinos are what everybody's talking about. In another life, if the world were a different place, my mom probably would have been a fashion designer or a stylist or something like that. She's always the best-dressed person at a protest, but she's very fashion-forward scientifically, it turns out. So I would just say my mom was even influential in that sense, which I think would surprise anybody who knows a little bit of her background. She's not at all a scientist, not at all a math person. And she's very uncomfortable doing even basic math. But she had an intuition about neutrinos, and I think she's right. There are some of the most interesting particles out there.
KC: I love that. Thank you so much for sharing. I know you fell in love with physics when you were quite young, despite not having learned about Black scientists and physicists you look up to. And to be honest, physics was probably my personal weakest field of study between that, biology, and chemistry during my formal education. And to me, a lot of it just feels very abstract and difficult to understand.
But I am curious what it was about the field that sparked your early interest and fascination, and what are some big or larger-than-life questions about how the world works that you were and have been curious to think through, through the lens of physics?
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Probably black holes were kind of my gateway and my mind. My mom took me to see a documentary about Stephen Hawking called A Brief History of Time, and I was ten years old and I didn't want to go. It meant I had to miss Saturday morning cartoons because we could only afford matinees, so we were going to an early showing. Halfway through the documentary, Stephen Hawking was talking about how we didn't understand the physics of singularities, and that the laws of physics broke down at the center of a black hole. And I was starting to gather that this was his day job to worry about this question that Einstein hadn't been able to resolve. And I was like, 'Wait, you can get paid to use math to describe the universe and to solve problems that Einstein couldn't work out? That is the job that I want.'
As a working-class kid, I knew I had to have a career, and knew that that was the only way out of the community where I grew up. I mean, we can have a whole conversation about why I thought about it in those terms, but I loved the idea of using math all day. I was already at a point where I knew that I liked math, and that was my introduction to the idea that math was the language that we use to describe how the universe works. And that was super exciting for me.
The interesting thing is that I ended up writing my senior thesis in undergrad about active galactic nuclei, which are galaxies that have particularly powerful black holes at their core. So I did eventually do work on black holes, one of my dissertation chapters was about a black hole solution in a particularly quirky model of gravity. But black holes haven't been a major part of my professional life, so that was something that I moved away from. And at this point, I'm at a stage in my career where I'm reassessing what are the research questions that I'm going to work on, and I've been returning to what are these fundamental questions about space-time that we still haven't answered and that people are starting to leave behind because they're getting super hype about quantum computers. But we still haven't solved these other problems. They're still out there and they're still really interesting and compelling, in my opinion.
KC: You've certainly gone a long way since your early interest and fascination. Today, you are one of less than 100 Black American women to have earned a Ph.D. from a Department of Physics, and you're also one of the only Black women theoretical physicists in the world. Though you've noted that on top of becoming a scientist, you've also had to become an expert on racism, sexism, and colonialism in science. So to offer some historical backdrop, I wonder if you can share how the contributions and leadership of Black scientists have often been erased from history, and what are some notable examples of this that people should know? And what do you think has been the impact of the skewed narratives around science and what that means and looks like?
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: The first name that comes to mind is Elmer Imes. And for listeners who are U.S. based, maybe the reading name here is Noah Larson, who is the author of Passing, the Harlem Renaissance novel, and it was recently adapted into a film on Netflix. I was one of the people who thought, don't do that adaptation, and I had to confess in public that I was completely wrong, it was a brilliant adaptation. Elmer Imes was for a time married to Noah Larson, so there's this kind of great connection between the Harlem Renaissance and the history of Black people in physics.
Elmer Imes was the second African-American to earn a Ph.D. in physics. He earned it, I believe, in 1918 from the University of Michigan, and his dissertation work was some of the first experimental work that affirmed that quantum mechanics was the correct description of atomic physics. That's not a name that we learn in textbooks, it's not mentioned in quantum mechanics textbooks.
Usually, the way that physicists learn any history of physics in the history of our field is from the little comments that are made in textbooks or the things that make their way into pop culture. So it's a really big problem that Elmer Imes is not one of those names that get circulated.
I think that's a really good example of someone who doesn't get their due.
To situate in context some of the statistics you write—I do think we're either at about the 100 point or about to get there. So when it comes to the question of U.S.-rooted Black women, whether that's those of us who are born in the US, or who have done a lot of our education in the US, or in some other way US-rooted, the number 100 can be hard to understand in context if you don't know anything about statistics and physics Ph.D. production. There are about 2000 PhDs granted in the United States in physics every single year. In the first 50 years since the first African-American woman earned a Ph.D. in physics, that was Willie Hobbs Moore in 1972 from the University of Michigan, there were under 100 Black-American women, specifically from physics departments. The number grows if you think about related fields like astronomy and areas of material science or physics, etc.
So again, just to give context, 2000 PhDs every year versus 100 PhDs over 50 years. I think one of the risks of talking about those numbers, and this was something that I didn't appreciate when I first started talking about it—in the post-Hidden Figures era, now that the film has come out and people are aware that there are Black women scientists that sometimes they're not talking about, there is this tendency to want to search for this person is number 51, this person's number 52, and to create a narrative about the significance of that person.
While each person is individually significant, I think the importance of naming the numbers is not to brand ourselves as like, 'Oh, yeah, I'm number 63, how cool am I,’ which I think is sometimes what people think that I have been doing, but to talk about how f*cked up it is that the numbers are so low.
KC: I'm curious if you think there's a particular reason that there are fewer Black women in the field of physics in general compared to other fields of science.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: My particular perspective on this is very rooted in Iran. Iwan Rhys Morus's history of physics, When Physics Became King. During the 19th century, physics became kind of the king of the sciences. And I think that the gendering here is purposeful and important because I do think that there is a very masculine and colonial element to it as well. And that continued into the 20th century, especially in the post-Manhattan Project era. Physics was powerful technologically, and it brought a kind of power to the table that the other sciences didn't in terms of shifting institutional relations and the utility to institutions of power, like the military-industrial complex.
So I think physics, maybe even more strongly than other areas of science, has hewed closely to the patterns of those power structures, which are deeply white supremacist and colonialist and therefore patriarchal and ableist and cis-heterosexist and all of these things.
That's kind of my theory, is that it's a historical evolution.
KC: I'm sure this historically skewed make-up of the physics community has had tremendous impacts on the types of inquiries that have been raised, the types of research that have been conducted, and the approaches as well. And so far on the show, we have engaged with a wide variety of fields like biology, chemistry, ecology, indigenous science, our various social sciences, as well as a lot of other non-scientific ways of knowing, feeling, creating, and thinking. And I don't think we've been guided to apply the lens of physics, or even astrophysics, to look at our socio-ecological spiritual crises and dynamics before. It fascinates me that you've used your unique perspectives and background to explore the physics of melanin. How would you introduce this concept to somebody new to it? And how would you invite our listeners to start thinking about the relationship between physics and our social injustices and planetary ailments?
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: The reason that I started thinking about the physics of melanin was very simply because, like many people of color, I was diagnosed by my doctor as vitamin D deficient, and then he told me that this was common among people of African descent. I think that there there are some question marks there about the way that vitamin D levels are measured and because that baseline is kind of evolved around people who are not melanated, so there are some questions there about whether these tests could be done better.
But I'm not a medical expert and I'm not a biology expert, so that's all that I will say about that. But it was interesting for me because that was the first time that I had ever thought about melanin in my skin as a scientific phenomenon. In particular, the question about vitamin D is related to the absorption of sunlight. As a physicist, this should be a very natural thing for me to think about, because a lot of what we do in astronomy is think about how is light absorbed, how is it interacting with different surfaces, whether it's like the mirror in a telescope or whether it's reflecting off of a planet or being emitted by a star?
With all of these different phenomena, we're often thinking about light and how light interacts. So at some point, I was just like, wow, I can't believe I never asked myself the question of, what is this very basic interaction between light and our skin?
KC: And the other piece I would be curious how you would invite our listeners to think about the relationship between physics and our ecological crises. So maybe it has to do with sunlight and our climate crisis? What are some ways that you've thought through these things?
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I think the bigger question is not necessarily specifically about physics, but generally speaking, about how we culturally engage with science and the role of science in our communities and how it shapes our mindset and what our mindset about science is.
There's this tendency, particularly in these hyper-colonial societies like in the United States and Europe, where the culture has traditionally been very colonialist, very imperialist, to say that technology and progress are the same thing, that technology is progress.
The challenge that I present to people about that is that global warming is a technological advancement. Global warming is a technological achievement- we now know how to change the ecosystem of an entire planet, we now know how to warm an entire planet, and we now know how to change the composition of the atmosphere. I mean, even just thinking about when I was a kid, there was this giant hole in the ozone layer, and actually, we took steps to address that, and the ozone layer is in a better place now. These are technological developments, and most of them have been bad. I think that challenges the narrative that technology is always progress and that the fact of technology and the enactment of technology is always a separate progress.
I was listening to your last episode before we recorded with Enrique Salmón, and he was talking about some lessons that were lessons that I also learned as a child. And in particular, I wrote down a couple of the comments that he made. So he said the land is a relative to us. He specifically said that this is not a metaphysical comment, that the land, the rocks, the trees, these are genuinely our relatives, they're our kin. And I think that's something that's a point of view that I was raised with. And so I think for me, it's a very natural way of looking at the world. But for people for whom it is not their cultural orientation, it's not a viewpoint that they were raised with, I would invite them to think about the power of thinking through that lens and whether if people who were using technology a hundred years ago had this mindset, whether we would be in this ecological catastrophic crisis that we are currently in.
If as Kanaka Maoli, native Hawaiians say, 'the land is our relative'…
what might scientists have done differently in terms of their engagement with technology, the recommendations they were making to policymakers about the uses of technology if at every stage they were saying to themselves, the land is our kin?
The land is our relative, the squirrels are our relatives, the chipmunks are our relatives, the cardinals are our relatives. I'm just naming the wildlife that I see a lot around my house in particular.
KC: Speaking of these underlying worldviews, we have conversed with various scientists and people with other cultural backgrounds who have critiqued the limitations of Western science in terms of some of its presumptions and philosophies, such as how reducing things to their smallest components in isolation is the most reliable way to study certain things, or how producing replicable and generalizable findings as the ultimate goal, as the signifier of credibility, or how central the researchers sense of objectivity is as an outsider to what's being studied. And to the contrary, Indigenous science and other approaches to understanding the world might invite people to honor things like relationality that you just spoke to and the important impacts of being one part of the matrix. Also honoring context-dependent and ever-changing and non-universal knowledge as well, and also more holistic perspectives that understand the whole to be more than the sum of their parts divided up.
When you talk about the historical leadership and contributions of Black and Indigenous scientists around the globe who have practiced astronomy or other sciences deep into our historical past, I wonder what you've noted in regards to how people have defined or approached science differently, and also as a Black queer person who was a leader in the scientific community today, I wonder if the alternative lenses such as relationality, which you resonate with, and just being a part of the matrix also apply when it comes to opening up other ways of understanding things like particle matter and astronomy. It's kind of hard for me to comprehend what that might look like, but what have you thought through in these regards?
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein:
I think that these are all frameworks, and a problem that we are currently dealing with the fallout from and continues to be an issue is supremacy, the idea that one framework is supreme over the others.
And I would encourage everyone who has an ideological commitment of that kind to ask themselves whether the framework that they are ideologically committed to truly is perfect and supreme, and that other frameworks have nothing to offer to it. So it happens to be that the framework that I work in uses a particular mathematical description to understand the way that the physical world works. It's highly successful along certain metrics, it does a very good job of predicting outcomes of experiments, for example, it does a very good job of understanding the science of constituting phenomena like multiple particles as individual types of objects, and how those work in concert with each other to form phenomena like atoms. And I think that there's something really beautiful about that framework. I also don't have to be married to that framework as the only way to look at the world.
And so from my point of view, the problem is when someone walks up and is like, no, that's the only way to look at the world. And I remember, for example, Stephen Hawking towards the end of his life, we're talking about how there was no need for God anymore because we had physics. I'm paraphrasing and potentially poorly paraphrasing, but that was my takeaway from it. I'm not a person who has faith in the supernatural, but it's my point of view as a physicist that actually what we do as physicists doesn't tell us anything about whether there is a God or not. That's not the set of questions that our toolkit is designed to answer.
It's okay to know what your tools can and cannot do, and it's okay to know also that how you use your tools and how you think about the potential of your tools is shaped by the political and by the social.
Just to go back to that example about technology—sure, we can build the thing, but the question of whether we should build the thing and how we use it and how often we use it and what we allow it to do to the land, to the people, to the environment. Those are political and social questions, and enlightenment frameworks have not been good guides on how to be responsible in a way that leads to healthy ecosystems that are in harmony. I try to be very careful about essentializing, I don't want to essentialize any one framework as this way is better. And I also don't want to essentialize Indigenous ways of knowing- of course, there's a plurality because Indigenous people are not all one community, there are many.
Even just looking at Africa and the diversity of the Indigenous communities there, that's already an incredible breadth. What I will say is that every single community has mechanisms of rational knowledge production and has developed those mechanisms for its own purposes, and those purposes have been contextualized by the community's politics and cultural values, and social values. I think that we are trying to figure out the ways of looking at the world and being with and being in the world that allow us to be curious as a species. Because as a species we are curious, I think that is one thing that's universal about us biologically or at least culturally, but also allows us and other species simultaneously to thrive. And I think that it's clear that Western imperial dominance is not a good recipe for that.
KC: I resonate with this call to respect and honor and learn from all of the above, because I think that is what helps us to expand and broaden our perspectives and gain a more holistic and truer understanding of the world. And it also just speaks to the importance of maintaining a sense of humility and recognizing the limits of our personal lenses and ways of knowing. And in preparation for our conversation, I watched one of your past talks where you shared your excitement about the axion, and to be honest, I felt lost just because I haven't ever really had opportunities to learn even the basics of what dark matter is. But this is, of course, what you spend a major part of your research on. So how would you introduce what dark matter is and the significance of your advocacy for it to be known as invisible matter rather than dark matter? And also, how have you thought through or critiqued analogies that compare dark matter to the Black experience?
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: So I think this is a really good example of where a framework works particularly well, that the physics framework over using laws that we've developed a local understanding of, for example, gravity to interpret data that we get through telescopes has allowed us to understand that most of the matter in the universe that's gravitating the way that the Earth and the Sun have a gravitational interaction with each other and the earth is in orbit around the sun. We are on the surface of the earth or near to the surface of the earth because of gravity. And so there's this tendency to think that what's gravitating and what's matter that's out there is stuff that's visible like us, what we would call visible matter. But, thanks to our understanding of the laws of physics, we know that most of the gravitating matter in the universe is completely invisible to us, and that's most of what we know about it. Otherwise, it's a complete mystery, and this is something that we're spending a lot of time trying to understand.
So this phenomenon, for historical reasons is called dark matter. But as you mentioned, to give people a better intuition for what it is, it likely should be called invisible matter or transparent matter, because almost certainly light goes through it. There is one hypothetical scenario where dark matter is comprised of what we would call primordial black holes, so black holes that formed in the very early universe. And that's probably the one scenario where I'd be like, yeah, okay, it absorbs light because black holes absorb light and then you can't see it anymore, it's lights out. But most of our models, and I would say that most of the community's models lean towards thinking a more realistic scenario is one where dark matter is comprised of a particle that we've never seen in the lab before. And in that scenario, that particle probably doesn't have many interactions with light. So it's very different from melanin, for example. Light probably goes right through it, so it's transparent. So that's generally speaking, what the dark matter problem is.
I have become particularly well-known in the physics community for being an expert on a particular candidate for dark matter. And this is a hypothetical particle, so it's a particle we still have never seen. It's called the Axion, and it was almost called the Higglet, which I think was a really big missed opportunity. And one of the reasons I'm a fan of this particle is that we need it to solve another problem in particle physics. So it's a twofer basically- the professional way of saying that is that it's a well-motivated model.
KC: And how about just the analogies that have compared dark matter to the Black experience? I'd love for you to speak a little about that as well.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I've noticed something of a pattern, particularly with people working in African-American studies and Black thought and Black studies to take up dark matter as an analogy for the Black experience. There's a level on which I understand that because what people have been told is that it's called dark matter. So I think when there can be this feeling of this is a way that we can kind of be attuned to the fact and phenomenon of colorism, which there is simply not enough discussion about.
Even in the last few years when there's been increased discussion about issues of race and racism in US discourse, it's still really challenging to get people to talk about colorism and how colorism has shaped even the landscape of what that conversation looks like and who gets heard. And I say that as a light-skinned Black person, we need to talk more about that. So I understand that aspect of wanting to grab onto something that uses the word dark and is extraordinary.
I think the phenomenon of dark matter is an extraordinary phenomenon. I think there's also this feeling of, well, dark matter is invisible and Black people are invisible. And on the one hand, I get that, and I'm a huge fan of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man novel. But I think that the analogy with dark matter in particular doesn't do justice to the listener on either side. So for the person who is an expert on physics but maybe doesn't know so much about the Black experience, and when they hear that analogy, they're like, oh yeah, Black people are just invisible. But look, Black people are hyper-visible. That's one thing, is there's a mix of being hyper-visible and invisible at the same time.
But the other thing is that I think it affirms for some people the idea that Black people are just magically different from white people, and that's a problem because we're not. So I have a chapter in my book, The Disordered Cosmos, called Black People Are a Luminous Matter, because I wanted to hit home that we are just human, and we are human just like white people. And so I think that that's one side of it. And I think that for the other side, for Black folks who understand being racialized and dealing with anti-Blackness and dealing with racism, but maybe don't know something about dark matter, that the analogy can misinform them about what dark matter is. Dark matter isn't just another type of matter that stuff is made out of. The stuff that we can see is not made out of dark matter. Everything that we can see, including ourselves, was made out of the same star stuff.
It's really important to hit home that Black people are star stuff and Black people are luminous matter—vibrant, luminous matter, beautiful luminous matter, and complicated luminous matter. And all of the ways that other human beings are, we are too.
KC: Thank you for this clarification. I'm just still thinking through how something like astrophysics and physics in general, which can feel out there for a lot of us, relates to some of our most pressing and felt issues of today, like our various social injustices, people's various cultural values and relationships to our lands and their so-called resources, and then the impacts of those worldviews. And I just feel very stimulated engaging with your work because of how groundbreaking it is when you leave these diverse disciplines together and different ways of looking at these issues, and how it transcends a lot of normalized narratives about the world.
And what stood out for me was when you shared, "The standard model is everything that we can see, all of the particles we can see, but it's not necessarily everything that we can feel. It is mostly not what the universe is made of. The universe is mostly made up of stuff that we can't see." So what lessons do you think we can take away here in that there's so much that we can feel but not necessarily see? And how might these larger-than-life inquiries about the universe help us to put things into perspective and maybe better understand what it means to be alive as these minuscule humans during this time of social, ecological, and spiritual crises?
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I think the important thing, as I said earlier, is that humans as a species are curious. The Black feminist philosopher of science and novelist Sylvia Wynter has articulated humans as homo narrans. We are a storytelling species, and I think she was meditating on the ideas of Juan Luis Arsuaga when she said this. And she says that we were composed of bios and mythoi.
We are a biological species, but we are also a social species, and storytelling is part of what we do. What I think of what we do in physics as a form of storytelling, we have a set of rules that our storytelling has to follow. We have a very specific toolkit that we use to craft our stories. ut we are storytelling, and that is something that I think regardless of someone's orientation, they can relate to that activity and that idea and orientation.
If you look at the history of human communities, every human community has told stories about the way the world is and why the world is the way that it is, stories about the night sky, stories about the seasons…
And so I knew that at least some of my colleagues from the scientific community would be like, 'Yeah, but ours are correct and some people's aren't correct.' But I think, just coming back to the question of Indigenous ways of knowing and Indigenous sciences, whether or not the word sciences is the right word in their cultural context. I think that can be one of the complicating things, is that sometimes we're saying, 'that Indigenous community is doing science', but that's not the right translation of the word that they would use to describe their activity. So we have to be careful and thoughtful about that.
Coming back to that question, when you look at the rise of science in Europe and the United States and the rise of science in the colonial countries, what you see also is a history of settler-colonizers and travelers going and learning information from Indigenous people and collating that information. So even looked at in a historical context, there's this tendency to be like, 'Well, this kind of science that is better at storytelling just happened to evolve in Europe.' But the truth is that we were getting a lot of help. And the big thing that they were doing was they were using force to collect all the information, and then they had the privilege of collating it and thinking about it all together simultaneously. So you can imagine the difference between having access to a giant library and only having access to a couple of the books, particularly if you've gone around the world and at gunpoint, taken everybody's books and put them all in the library.
So I think when we talk about the history of our storytelling practice and science, and how our tools have developed, particularly I think the easy example here is when we talk about medicines, there are so many medicines that are based on herbal knowledge that was gathered by so-called explorers from Indigenous nurseries in different parts of the world, and this is something that increasingly historians of science are documenting.
So this idea of this one particular framework being superior and being part of a superior culture, I think about the Ghanaian philosopher, Kwasi Wiredu, who has a great essay. I think it could be a little bit controversial because he makes some pointed comments about Africans and mysticism and spiritualism and how it's not scientific, and I think that there's probably a lot people could unpack there. But part of what's powerful about the essay is that he says Europeans are the same. He says that Europeans tend to be extremely mystical and spiritually oriented. And so this bifurcation of one community is rational and the others are the so-called savages is just bullshit. History is written by the victors, and so it's a story that's being written by the victors.
Part of the work that I do as a scientist is to try and be aware that the story that I have been told about how we got here is not necessarily what happened, and to welcome people back in—in some cases to their traditions.
KC: This really speaks to the importance of media and storytelling and who is writing these histories and stories, and also just the context of how this knowledge was collected and sometimes stolen or co-opted is also really important to take into account as well. And earlier you mentioned the night sky. A few years ago now, we welcomed Ruskin Hartley of the International Dark Sky Association to the podcast, and you mentioned that you think they're one of the most important scientific organizations out there. So I'm curious about what you think is the significance of the various questions that advocating for dark skies brings together. And on this note, I want to support you to send the message of renaming a telescope after Harriet Tubman up into the sky and also invite you to share the power of putting her out there with "the stars that represented freedom.”
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Maybe I'll just start with that. So the most recent great observatory that NASA in partnership with the European Space Agency, launched, which is publicly known as JWST, and I won't say the person that it's named after, but the person that it's named after was an establishment player who had responsibility for the development of psychological warfare as a Cold War tool and was also implicated in mediations in the Lavender Scare. So the systematic harassment and firings of LGBT people from the federal government, including NASA when he was the leader during the Apollo era, there was at least one NASA employee who was arrested for being gay, and was picked up by the chief of security for NASA AND extra-judicially interrogated by NASA's security and then fired. And the reason that we knew the story is that he subsequently sued. And so I, Lucianne Walkowitz, Sarah Tuttle, and Brian Nord have proposed that the telescope should be renamed the Harriet Tubman Space Telescope. And we have good evidence to suggest that Harriet Tubman was a brilliant naturalist who understood her environment and likely used the North Star to navigate on the Underground Railroad.
We do know for sure that enslaved people used the North Star as the guide to freedom, and I can't think of a better use for astronomy than escaping chattel slavery.
So I think it's very obvious when we go out into space we should be sending the best of humanity. And our dreams and our aspirations and our goals and people who represent the best of us. And I can't think of someone who would identify as an American who better represents who we should be than Harriet Tubman, who fought every day for freedom and justice for her people.
To bring that back to questions of what the dark sky represents to us, one of the reasons that people were able to use the night sky to run to freedom is because the night sky was visible and consistent. There weren't a bunch of like Elon Musk satellites, launch satellites lighting the sky, making it difficult to tell what's a star and what's not a star, they didn't have significant problems with light pollution. The dark night sky is what our species evolved under, and until very recently, all of our ancestors had a very clear view of the night sky.
I think we need to think of the night sky as part of our ecosystem and part of our ancestral inheritance that is currently being squandered on completely undemocratic terms that people are making these decisions for us with very little regulation or government interference.
I think that what the International Dark Sky Association does is quite radical, even though I think people might look at it and say, well, that's not very political and, simply, they're calling to protect dark skies. But the implications are huge. I think about the people in Wonder Valley in California, which is near is home to a lot of Joshua trees and very near Joshua Tree National Park, and they're currently fighting the development of a new mega-hotel and possibly like an entirely new build of extensive houses that would pump the groundwater supply that Joshua trees rely on for their survival. And part of the fight, I think, is protecting the dark night sky. And so protecting the dark night sky means asking tough questions about these so-called exciting developments.
KC: I recently spoke with Dr. Aparna Venkatesan, who also is an advocate for protecting dark skies. We talked about this difficult question where she mentions, who has access to broadband connection, and to increase that accessibility due to the injustice of who currently has access to these technologies has to be addressed.
There's this recognition that if that were the vision for the future, then we do have to increase the number of satellites out there to expand people's accessibility to broadband connection. But at the same time, knowing that this would also contribute to the issue of light pollution, I would be curious to hear what you think in terms of this because her take was that this is inevitable, so we have to think about the best ways to involve more stakeholders because as you mentioned, currently the decision-making process leaves out a lot of voices and is primarily driven by privatized interests. But what other considerations or difficult questions should we be asking here?
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: One of the first things that come to mind is that there are Indigenous communities in the Amazon that are like, leave us the fuck alone. They aren't asking for satellite Internet. They're asking people to leave them the fuck alone. So I think the first thing is, is that we have to be careful about the presumption.
Again, I think that this is the technology equals progress question—that people have different relationships to what kinds of technology they want access to. Some people want access to the technology of the night sky and of being able to use the night sky to navigate.
I think the first thing that comes to mind here is actually that astronomers in particular, and this comes up, for example, in the fight about the 30-meter telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, have a really difficult time with the idea that sometimes the answer about so-called development is no, we don't want that. So I think that we need to be careful about saying that things are inevitable.
The moment you start declaring that something is inevitable, you've taken the side of ensuring that it happens and that certain stakeholders are going to be run over in that process. So I find that concerning.
In context, it happens to be that right now I'm rereading Arundhati Roy's nonfiction going back to the early 1990s. She has a 1000-page collection of her nonfiction, and she was the essayist that I first read that convinced me that writing nonfiction and reading nonfiction was worth my time, and I think in a lot of ways was the foundational model for the kind of writer that I am now. And some of the early stuff I hadn't read before, and in particular, she has these very deep dives into the way that the Indian government in in the decades after independence, used the idea of technology and development and economic growth to argue that dams had to be built, and these dams ended up displacing Indigenous people. I think one of my takeaways from having read through three or four essays of hers by now on this, is that there's no such thing as an ecologically-sound dam, dams are always a bad idea. It reduces the amount of land that's available for people to live on and farm, and it created a situation where people went from being able to live in harmony with their ecosystem and use technologies that were indigenous to their community, to forcing them into a capitalist economic relationship with external communities and with their government, where they became deeply impoverished and people went from being a part of thriving Indigenous communities to their children starving to death. And this was considered development, and this was considered inevitable technological progress.
So I think that we have to be suspicious of anyone saying that we just have to go along with this, and now we just have to minimize the damage. That's been the narrative of the last 100 years, and look at where it has gotten us. That's not going to save our lives. And that's not giving people a seat at the table. If you're like look, you have to accept this thing is going to damage your community, but we're here to talk with you about how you can benefit from this thing that's going to damage your community. To the particular question of this is going to happen, but we need it to happen because people need access to the Internet, I get that there are some communities where people do feel like, oh yeah, we want access to the Internet. But is Elon Musk planning to make that available to all for free, for real? Is that how this unfolds? That's not how this unfolds, I'm just going to say that clearly. And we're now seeing that in the Amazon, people are using that satellite Internet to fucking kill Indigenous people. So I think we all need to really sit and think carefully about the so-called human right to the Internet because it's a really good line that Elon Musk and his cronies benefit from, but they don't give a flying fuck about human rights. I'm sorry, there's no polite way to put that. They don't care.
KC: Aparna certainly spoke to some of these nuances, so I don't want to oversimplify everything that she said. I was paraphrasing, but I think all of this speaks to how there are competing visions of justice. Certain people might want in on certain things because of the visions that have been sold and told to them that this is how things should be, this is what improving our quality of life looks like, and this is what advancement looks like. And when these visions of justice and equity are narrow in scope for whose interests they consider, then some of these visions can worsen injustice for other people. So again, it's really important to take into account these diverse perspectives at hand, and always critical to bring in more voices and more stakeholders so that it could be ideally a much more collective decision than ones driven by particular people, incentivized by the values of profit above all else.
Anyway, we're coming to a close for our main conversation here, but I feel like there are so many things in general that you research and talk about that I couldn't even begin to know how to ask you, so I want to leave this space for you to share anything else you would like to leave with our listeners and also any other calls to action or a deeper inquiry you have for us.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I want to encourage people to look at the Stop Wonder Valley community and learn more about what's happening in California. And I think that is a particularly informative fight because that is a state that is truly experiencing a water crisis. It is truly experiencing the many crises of global warming, the fires, and now the floods. And so I think that it's important to pay attention to the different ways that people are starting to organize in synergistic ways against development that is ecologically harmful. And the way that they're bringing the night sky into that conversation, I think it's really powerful.
~ musical intermission ~
KC: What's been one of the most impactful books that you've read or publications you follow?
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Right now, I'm excited about Specter, a Marxist journal. They have fantastic social analysis and they're kind of aimed at academics. But I think that there are broadly accessible.
KC: What is a personal motto, mantra or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I was very, very influenced growing up and into adulthood by Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen monk who passed away last year. And actually, I often think of a very simple thing that he would often remind people: breathing in, I am home.
KC: And what is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I'm so excited by the kids that are organizing their schools and communities and telling these raggedy-ass authoritarians that they will die on their feet, that they refuse to live on their knees. I particularly just want to shout out the coalition of students at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas carrying on the tradition I have of fighting for justice in their schools. And I think that any young people who are listening, you will save the world.
KC: Chanda, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It's been an absolute honor to be in conversation with you. For now, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: The other impactful mantra that I will just share- I'll share two more. "Optimism is better than despair", that's from Jack Layton. And "Hope is a practice," from Mariame Kaba. So practice hope. Keep going.
