Professional cruelty

The power and pain of standing next to mice

Once, during a panel that briefly mentioned medical racism and experimentation on enslaved people, a fellow early career researcher asked a question along these lines: if eugenicists considered people of color to be so different, then how could they assume that the results from these experiments could be translated to white people?

If you are familiar with the scientific culture in biomedical circles, this might be a silly question in some ways: we also consider mice to be vastly different, yet most of the scientific enterprise rests on their tiny bodies. Of course, I hope no one actually tried to make this point because in lieu of historical awareness, it may lead to a technical justification of the atrocities of human experimentation.

But if you are unfamiliar with the technocentric cultures of indifference in biomedical research, this seemingly innocent question on data quality amid a conversation about experiments on enslaved people might feel odd in more visceral ways. Maybe you are feeling the danger of comparisons with non-human animals, or you're feeling uncomfortable with the cold, technical focus in the face of something so gruesome as human experimentation.

Either way, highlighting all these unsaid bits is risky: it bares the risk of challenging the status quo, and even committing the ultimate sin of making people uncomfortable by forcing them to sit with the contradictions of the scientific community. You may end up showcasing science as a tool that is culturally situated and that can be weaponized against others, just like anything else that we may deem unscientific. You can invoke a conversation where we don't all agree or understand the basic premises. A conversation that does not have a clear bad guy — one that forces us to reflect on whether the bad guy is a system in which we all participate to our own advantage, staring strictly ahead at CV pages, publication metrics, DOI numbers, impact factors, awards, prestige.

This debate may further go astray and land on current biomedical practices that are cruel and prejudiced against marginalized groups, of which laboratory animals are merely the group holding the most animality, and therefore the most heavily marginalized.

At the time, I also felt the discomfort and the danger, but I did not have the vocabulary, the background, or the empowerment to raise my voice. I surely did not know that I could speak through anything other than data or someone else's peer-reviewed study, so I stayed quiet.

I did not have the spare time or emotional room to do months-to-years-worth of free labor that would allow me to voice my thoughts through graphs and tables, so I stayed quiet.

Most importantly, I did not know that I could speak through myself - that I could put things together and spew out my own understanding of them. But now I am ready to call it what it what it is: a type of anti-intersectionality.

I started doing the free labor and spending resources on books and workshops about colonialism, indigenous knowledge, intersectional feminism and history of science. Slowly, I started to raised my voice because I felt like I could at least turn the conversation into something that is less about the mice and more about people like me. I thought that would grant me a place to invoke people's engagement and empathy as they dealt with a fellow human being who is also oppressed by the way we do science.

I had no idea how tight I had to buckle up because, as it turns out, the same marginalization that allows me to stand next to the mice does exactly that: I stand next to mice. Being read as a woman of color from the Global South, I am never in a position to be heard. Everyone's empathy toward people like me have been mutilated by a system that demands oppression of mice and me. That's how you advance your scientific career in biomed, which requires a sort of psychic mutilation to prevent empathizing with those you oppress.

The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.

– bell hooks: The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, 2004

No one seemed to care that people like me suffered under the current conditions. They called me emotional and silenced me, portraying me as unable to speak about the issue "rationally". They shut the conversation down and, even when I brought up how my family is being left out of this oh-so-sacred technical progress, they minimized my concerns and dismissed me. They asked me to be more rational.

Just as that apathetic question about data quality coming from experiments in enslaved people, this request seems pathologically empty. It's designed to keep me out of the conversation because I can't escape the emotional rush of having my humanity up for debate (or that of my people). They, who are not in such precarious position, of course can talk calmly about it. They can be "rational", diplomatic, apathetic. Only they can discuss the state of my humanity.

From my perspective, this attitude that we should speak strictly in technical terms when faced with cruelty and injustice is pathologically apathetic. My peers seem to forget the lack of emotional reaction is also an emotional state -- one that is so is powerful that we use it as a diagnostic criterium. You see, if someone repeatedly sees or does harm without emotional reactions, we use this apathetic state as part of the diagnostic criteria for depression and psychopathy. But if this individual is wearing a lab coat, then we call it rationality, objectivity. We may even call it professionalism.

This all illustrates how rationality, professionalism and cruelty are woven together in biomedical logics. This apathetic state is not a glitch, it's the gold standard. We are actively trained to become apathetic because that is rational, we are told. Then we are repeatedly exposed to this notion through lectures, debate, journal clubs, etc. We see award-winning scientists portray a an outsider view, calmly explaining the epigenetics of the Rwandan genocide. We read books written by successful scientists with European surnames, discussing universal biomedical principles made by and for WEIRD populations. We see the long row of Nobel prize laureates and professors in renowned universities, all having this excitement for their science but ultimately apathetic and unquestioning of their surroundings.

And of course, we see that they are mostly white. Here we have it, folks. Of course whiteness is part of this power dynamic. As is the case with the wider job market, professionalism is itself enmeshed in whiteness. We just double down on it because we add this institutionalized demand for rationality, which is also a reflection of whiteness.

Indeed, we come from a long tradition of the white man freely inflicting suffering onto others because they were the sole bearers of rational thought.

But times has change: no one, as an individual or ethnic group, can claim to be the barer of rational thought anymore. We can only do it as a scientific community, then keep away any challenge to our assumptions. People of the Global Majority hold hands with white Europeans to display hostility at the first sight of a social justice discussion.

Times have truly changed: now people of any ethnicity can inflict suffering in the name of rationality.