Trump’s Cuts to N.I.H. Grants Focused on Minority Groups Are Illegal, Judge Rules; The New York Times, June 16, 2025

 Zach Montague, The New York Times ; Trump’s Cuts to N.I.H. Grants Focused on Minority Groups Are Illegal, Judge Rules

"A federal judge on Monday declared some of the Trump administration’s cuts to National Institutes of Health grants “void and illegal,” accusing the government of racial discrimination and prejudice against L.G.B.T.Q. individuals.

Ruling from the bench, Judge William G. Young of the Federal District Court for the District of Massachusetts delivered a damning assessment of the Trump administrations’ motives in targeting hundreds of grants that focused on the health of Black communities, women and L.G.B.T.Q. people. He ordered the government to restore much of that funding for now, pending an appeal.

“This represents racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s L.G.B.T.Q. community,” he said. “That’s what this is.”

Judge Young, a Reagan appointee with 40 years of experience as a federal judge, said the government’s rationale for canceling some of the grants, which also supported research into topics such as gender identity and equity in health care, appeared to be rooted in prejudice. He cited the administration’s very public efforts to eliminate any trace of diversity and equity initiatives from the federal government, as well as its attacks on transgender people.

He said that over the course of his career he had “never seen government racial discrimination like this,” and that he felt duty bound to state his conclusion about the government’s intent.

“I would be blind not to call it out,” he said...

Kenneth Parreno, a lawyer representing the American Public Health Association, called the government’s actions part of a campaign to ban what the administration saw as “forbidden topics” in science by canceling grants related to race or transgender health."

Sold: An 1891 Patent by Granville T. Woods, Innovative Black Engineer; Atlas Obscura, July 22, 2020

Matthew Taub, Atlas Obscura; Sold: An 1891 Patent by Granville T. Woods, Innovative Black Engineer

Woods was prolific, but was largely forgotten for many years after his death.

"Beginning during Woods’s lifetime, trade publications and other newspapers took to calling Woods the “Black Edison,” a nickname that reflected the virtual absence of Black Americans in engineering during Reconstruction and the late 19th century. That reality haunted Woods, who, according to a recent belated obituary in The New York Times, often said that he was born in Australia in order to distance himself from the strictures of America’s racial hierarchy. Though Woods found (relatively) more financial success later in life, after selling a series of inventions to the likes of General Electric and George Westinghouse—including an early version of the “dead man’s brake,” which can stop a train with an incapacitated conductor—he was still deprived of the recognition that others in his field enjoyed. In fact, despite working at the top of his field, alongside figures such as Westinghouse, Woods was buried in an unmarked grave in Queens, which only received a stone in 1975.

His life is a lesson not only in science and innovation, but also in the precariousness of legacy. Inventors, says Fouché—both those who enjoy credit and those who are denied it—rarely innovate in isolation. Many brilliant minds work simultaneously on the same problem, and for reasons of prejudice, luck, or law, just a few of them enter the historical record."

Merriam-Webster to revise racism definition after woman’s campaign; The Guardian, June 11, 2020

Poppy Noor, The Guardian; Merriam-Webster to revise racism definition after woman’s campaign

Kennedy Mitchum, who asked dictionary to update definition, said racism is ‘prejudice combined with social and institutional power’

"Editors at Merriam-Webster confirmed on Wednesday that they will revise the word’s definition after a campaign by a 22-year-old Drake University graduate, Kennedy Mitchum.

Mitchum wrote to the dictionary asking it to update its definition. She said that people often use the dictionary definition of racism to argue that something is not racist, on the basis that racism requires a personal dislike of someone based on their race to be real.

In an email to Merriam-Webster, Mitchum wrote: “Racism is not only prejudice against a certain race due to the color of a person’s skin, as it states in your dictionary,. It is both prejudice combined with social and institutional power. It is a system of advantage based on skin color.”

The definition, which incorporates the idea that prejudice alone is not racism (rather, racism requires a system of institutional power behind it in order to function) was put forward by the sociologist Patricia Bidol in the 1970s."

In Newly Found Audio, A Forgotten Civil Rights Leader Says Coming Out 'Was An Absolute Necessity'; NPR, January 6, 2019

Michel Martin and Emma Bowman, NPR; In Newly Found Audio, A Forgotten Civil Rights Leader Says Coming Out 'Was An Absolute Necessity'

"He was an adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. and the organizer behind the 1963 March on Washington.

Still, Bayard Rustin's legacy as a leading figure in the civil rights movement is little known today, even among many history buffs and within the LGBTQ community. His homosexuality cost him that visibility and was considered by some as a hindrance to the movement's success. 

Rustin died in 1987, but his silenced voice was recently resurrected in previously unaired audio from an interview with the Washington Blade in the mid-1980s. The audio will air this week in an episode of the podcast Making Gay History. It was discovered by Sara Burningham, the podcast's executive producer...

To Rustin, asserting his identity as an African-American went hand-in-hand with identifying as a gay man. "It occurred to me shortly after that that it was an absolute necessity for me to declare homosexuality, because if I didn't I was a part of the prejudice," he said. "I was aiding and abetting the prejudice that was a part of the effort to destroy me.""

The Gifted: X-Men TV Series is “About Bigotry” in 2017; Den Of Geek, July 25, 2017

David Crow, Den Of Geek; The Gifted: X-Men TV Series is “About Bigotry” in 2017

"Of all the many, many creations in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s extensive oeuvre, few have ever proven as potent for allegory and transmutative topicality as the mutants themselves. In other words, no superhero creation has been as fertile for political commentary as the X-Men. This is something that The Gifted, a new Fox network series set in the X-Men universe, is going to expand on in new and challenging ways for 2017. And it’s something the cast is very proud about.

“Yeah, I’m going to say straight-up you guys, our show’s about bigotry,” actress Emma Dumont tells me during an interview for The Gifted after the series’ San Diego Comic-Con panel. “I’m sorry, but we see it in the first scene when Blink’s running for her life and a cop could easily kill her dead with zero consequences, because of prejudice, because of prejudging her for something people are uncomfortable with, that they don’t understand, because people are born with this thing, and that is literally where we live.”"

Open-access harassment: science, technology and women; Guardian, 10/24/13

Georgina Voss Alice Bell, Guardian; Open-access harassment: science, technology and women: "Not of all these responses have been received well as their comment streams often stand testament to. Offering up the tech sector as a bastion of good practice around gender discrimination when such issues are ongoing and unresolved is incongruous, particularly given that pink-collar work is still prevalent in the industry. Making the call on whether to identify personal instances of harassment – and in particular, naming harassers – remains an impossible dilemma. However, academia’s steep and closed ranks are lesser (although not absent) which means that more open conversations with larger groups of participants can take place. The people – mostly men – at the top of the tech world wield considerably more power than those below, but not to the gatekeeper extent of the senior academics who are both untouchable for the millions of pounds they bring in in grant money for their institutions, whilst acting as gatekeepers to the entire system. These might be small mercies, but mercies they remain. One thing both science and technology communities share is an assumed neutrality combined with the mythos that career progression is egalitarian and meritocratic. Both academia’s hierarchies and tech’s allusions to freedom mean these go unquestioned. Moreover, this renders structural issues around sexism, racism and other areas of prejudice invisible, further disempowering those who find themselves at the receiving end. Want to start solving gender problems in science and technology? Bugger Google Glass: build the spectacles which render visible the invisible inequalities of power, culture and mythologies of meritocracy. In the absence of such a techno-fix, we should call those myths and issues out for what they are. In doing so, we can address a swathe of other problems too and make the fields more inclusive, productive, safe and fun for everyone."