In the fourth installment of the Lewis-Ezekoye Distinguished Lecture in Africana Studies, physics and women’s studies professor Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein spoke about access to cosmological studies and the importance of Black feminist analysis in science.

We often think of the vast and impersonal swaths of our universe that we call “outer space” as being removed and distant from the dynamics that trouble our earthly existence. But Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a professor of physics, astronomy, and women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire, conducts research that demonstrates that the same problems of inequality and discrimination that have shaped the world’s history are also shaping our future, as we turn towards the study of the cosmos. In a lecture titled “Black Feminism In Space,” Dr. Prescod-Weinstein explored this topic as the fourth installment of the Lewis-Ezekoye Distinguished Lecture in Africana Studies series on Tuesday, January 25, at 6 pm. 

The event, which was hosted on Zoom, began with introductions from President Beilock and Professor Yvette Christianse. President Beilock spoke of her excitement at having an astrophysicist give the lecture this year, as it is Barnard’s Year of Science.  She emphasized that at Barnard, there isn’t a division between the liberal arts and sciences, but rather that sciences are a key component of the liberal arts. Next, Denise Jackson-Lewis (BC ‘66), who endowed the lecture series, spoke. She decided to establish the Distinguished Lecture Series in honor of her friendship with her classmate, Adaeze Otue Ezekoye. Lewis spoke of her friendship with Ezekoye as a bond that crossed the Atlantic, from Nigeria (where Ezekoye is from) to Michigan (Lewis’ home). The lecture series, therefore, is an effort to continue the legacy of cross-continental communication, in appreciation of the rich tradition of African thought. Ezekoye spoke as well, talking of the lectureship as an opportunity to reveal and showcase the “hidden figures” of various academic fields. Finally, she turned the floor over to Professor Prescod-Weinstein.

This was Dr. Prescod-Weinstein’s second lecture at Barnard that day; she had earlier given a talk about “Cosmic Probes in the Dark Sector” as a part of Barnard’s Year of Science initiative. The nature of her two talks demonstrates her dual identity as a scientist and a critical sociologist, and in this lecture, she united the two to talk about the sociology of science: specifically, the issue of Black women’s access to the field of astrophysics. 

She began the lecture with the “fundamental premise” that a relationship to the night sky is part of humanity. “We evolved under the night sky,” she said. “Cosmological storytelling is part of who we are as human beings.” Therefore, to be cut off from the night sky is to be separated from part of our essential humanity. And yet, she argued, being cut off from the night sky is exactly what happens to people living in oppressed and marginalized conditions, denied equal circumstances and equal access to the study of the sky. 

Next, she declared a dichotomy: that “space is a site of our freedom dreams” while “space is a site of their colonial dreams.” This idea highlights how outer space is conceptually a political battleground, a frontier that could either be colonized by those who already wield all the power on Earth, or a realm of possibility where the systems of power on Earth could be literally transcended. To achieve this “freedom dream,” Dr. Prescod-Weinstein argued, we need Black feminism as our analytic guide.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein is a dark matter theorist and one of only around a hundred Black American women to hold a PhD in physics. She is also the first Black woman to hold a tenure-track faculty position in theoretical cosmology. Her barrier-breaking life may seem like a road map for Black scientists, but she carefully emphasized that she sees herself as coming from a long lineage of Black scientists, many of whom were unnamed and are unrecognized by history because they were enslaved. She also criticized the deeply-rooted Western sentiment that science was introduced to Africa by the white Western world––in fact, people across the continent of Africa were proficient in scientific thought; they devised astronomical systems, developed their own concept of vaccination, and practiced medicine.

Acknowledging that many noted Black scientists across history have been men, Dr. Prescod-Weinstein took a moment to note the forced contributions to science made by Black women who were used for scientific study, often suffering under white doctors’ convictions that Black people don’t feel equal pain. Specifically, in the field of gynecology, Black women were experimented on by the founder of the discipline. Dr. Prescod-Weinstein emphasized the importance of ensuring that we build a world where science never perpetuates such atrocities again.

Next, she spoke of modern Americans as “living in the wake of slavery,” in the wake of the plantation. America is defined by “plantation politics,” which refers to the connection between historical systems of oppression and their newest iterations, which are still used to control and exploit Black people. She clarified that she wasn’t arguing that all modern Americans live on a plantation––however, she said, some do, specifically those who are incarcerated. She argued for prison abolition, saying that slavery is still legal in our systems of mass incarceration. Additionally, she pointed out that our modern economy grows from a history of a plantation economy that was founded on stolen land. 

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein clarified that she wasn’t just speaking about descendants of Black Africans, but also about indigenous Americans: she showed a picture of Native Hawaiian women protesting the building of a telescope at Mauna Kea. “The idea of the plantation is not just present for those of us who are descendants of slaves in the Americas or descendants of people who survive colonialism in Africa, but also, for example, our kin in Hawaii,” she said. She stressed that Black feminist analysis is not only relevant or important to Black people, but applies broadly across a variety of communities. 

While referencing Patricia Hill Collins’ book Black Feminist Thought, Dr. Prescod-Weinstein next delved into the key features of Black feminism as an ideology and analytical strategy. She specifically underscored the importance of being aware of the “matrix of domination,” a term that refers to the complexity of distributions of power. She joked that as a scientist who does a lot of linear algebra using matrices, it’s helpful to her to visualize the matrix of domination. Another key feature of Black feminist thought is the importance of collectivity. “I’m gonna theorize y’all in real time,” she said, as she analyzed the friendship between Denise Lewis and Adaeze Otue Ezekoye as an example of two Black women engaging in collectivity through their friendship. She pointed out the potential power dynamic associated with one being from Nigeria and one being from the US; the matrix of domination calls for an awareness of the differences in Black feminist thought, and the inherent lack of homogeneity. 

She pivoted to talking about Black feminist thought as it applies to science. She argued for a view of science as “a community, as a set of practices, as a set of outcomes, as a collection of information shaped by the stories we tell about who matters and whose ideas count.” She next distinguished between universality and objectivity, saying that she wanted to clarify the distinction to avoid the common incredulous criticism that it’s not as if Black people have a different theory of gravity. “Nobody is saying that the laws of physics change because of Black feminism,” she said. The laws of physics are universal; however, the way people perceive these laws of physics is potentially influenced by a biased perspective. Everyone has bias in their perspective; therefore, there is no such thing as “objective” reality. 

Next, Dr. Prescod-Weinstein presented a slide on the “White Empiricism Cycle,” the process by which Black women (and other marginalized people) are systematically excluded from scientific thought. Many people have a schema of the “Ideal Physicist,” who, she argued, aligns with the “Ideal Patriarch” in terms of being white and institutionally sanctioned (which of course connotes a certain amount of privilege). People assume that the Ideal Patriarch’s ideas always merit consideration, from which they include that it can’t be possible that the Ideal Patriarch/Physicist could be biased against Black women. When Black women identify bias, therefore, they are considered to not be objective, from which it is concluded that they simply can’t be good physicists. From there, we again arrive at the idea that the only Ideal Physicist is the Ideal Patriarch. 

People often consider physics to be the highest, purest science; therefore, the idea that physics could be troubled by subjective bias is uncomfortable for a lot of scientists. However, Dr. Prescod-Weinstein argued, white empiricism is a form of anti-empiricism. If true empiricism remains the highest goal of scientists, that necessarily means refusing white supremacy on earth and refusing to let white empiricism contaminate science. Ultimately, she said emphatically, “we cannot escape to space because we will take our problems with us.”

Returning to the idea that space is the site of freedom dreams, Dr. Prescod-Weinstein spoke more about the material challenges to accessing the night sky. Specifically, she highlighted food security, housing security, clean water, sovereignty, clear skies, true accessibility, transformative justice and prison abolition, and the end of colonialism. Without changing these conditions that affect so many (disproportionately Black) people across the world, the universal right of access to space can’t be granted.

Before Black women were able to access space through institutions like NASA, they made symbolic achievements that were no less impactful. Dr. Prescod-Weinstein talked about the importance of seeing Nichelle Nichols as a Black woman on the TV show Stark Trek. She showed a cover of Ebony magazine featuring Nichols, from 1967. She said that she had bought the magazine as a Hanukkah gift for herself this year. Inside the article, Nichelle Nichols is hailed as “the first Negro astronaut,” which is framed as a triumph of television over NASA. Importantly, said Dr. Prescod-Weinstein, “we were dreaming of being up there before they would let us be up there.” 

Another person who was deeply influenced by Nichelle Nichols on Star Trek was Mae Carol Jemison, who became the first Black woman to go to space in 1992. When she went, she took with her a flag that had flown over the Organization of African Unity. This, said Dr. Prescod-Weinstein, is symbolic of the different ways that Black women have been freedom dreaming.

She showed a slide displaying the artwork of Lorna Simpson, whose art depicts Black women among stylized representations of stars and cosmos. Dr. Prescod-Weinstein explained that the cover of her own book, The Disordered Cosmos, owes a lot to the work of Simpson. Simpson’s work imagines a cosmological relationship between Black women and the stars that isn’t mediated by the pseudo-militarized situation that institutions like NASA maintain. Dr. Prescod-Weinstein also cited the poet Nikki Giovanni, who imagined what sex would look like in space, pointing towards the question of what Black pleasure could be like in space. She cited Giovanni’s quote, “All my people have ever done is go forward,” as a road map for Black people’s freedom dreams towards space.

In an upcoming article in The Baffler titled “Becoming Martian,” Prescod-Weinstein will argue for a Black feminist physics in the style of Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought. She presented a preview of this article for the lecture’s audience, laying out some key tenets of Black Feminist Physics. Importantly, Black feminist physics is fundamentally opposed to “(trans)misogynoirist distributions of social power.” It sees complexity as normative, modeled on the inherent complexity of the experiences of identity that Black people who aren’t cis men are familiar with. It is fundamentally affected by solidarity, and it is driven by a linkage between theory and action. Dr. Prescod-Weinstein explained that this upcoming article is the one she’s proudest of having written in her entire career.

Concluding the lecture, she took a moment to honor the Haitians who are currently struggling for liberation, to whom her book is dedicated. As a Black person with Caribbean roots, she feels particularly connected to their history. Finally, she affirmed that the main takeaway she wished to impart was that “cosmological storytelling is like liberation struggle. It’s fundamentally human, it’s extremely Black, and they can be linked together.” The audience reacted enthusiastically, pouring messages of support and assurances of inspiration into the chat. 

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein’s lecture was, like the night sky, illuminating and important. Weaving science with sociology, she demonstrated the complexity of universality. If space isn’t universally accessible, a site of freedom and expansive possibility for everyone, then surely nothing is. Therefore, breaking down the barriers that inhibit access to space and the study of it is of unique universal importance. 

Her book The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, is available for purchase from Bold Type Books.

Amazing space via Creative Commons