It has taken me days to figure out what to say. The killings of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd have left me horrified. And those before them: Tamir Rice. Trayvon Martin. Oscar Grant. Eric Garner. Philando Castile. Samuel Dubose. Walter Scott. Sandra Bland. And Terrence Crutcher. And too many others before them. Their lives mattered. Black lives matter.
And I am left wondering what I can do, and whether my work is so inconsequential, given the continuing injustice in the world. But what we do is still important. And our work is especially important at UCSF, where our voices calling for justice and fairness and kindness can be amplified by an organization that values diversity.
But voices are only amplified when one chooses to speak. We must not stay silent. And we must also listen, and learn, and ask others without privilege if we can share and amplify their voices.
I am also left thinking we are the lucky ones, that made it to this point in our careers, that get to do the research and deliver care, that might someday make a difference to individuals in need. And in the middle of the pandemic, many of our compute- or data-oriented research groups even get to work from home. So this might put us in the ultimate bubble, within a bubble, within a bubble.
It’s time to step outside of our bubbles. We need to acknowledge what’s happening. Our neighbors are hurting. They’ve been hurting.
Every tick on a Kaplan-Meier plot, every cell that is probed, every gene that is sequenced, every prescription that is unaffordable, represents an individual, and their only voice might be the point of data I am privileged to analyze.
What else can we do? We can also give to organizations that can help:
Many of us use data for our research. There is probably no more important dataset right now for our neighbors than the US Census. Make sure all of our neighbors participate in the US Census. Missing data here means missing lives. Support groups that ensure all our neighbors are counted, like the Leadership Conference Education Fund and Census Counts.
https://civilrights.org/edfund/
I have already given to all of these organizations mentioned above, and I encourage those of you who are lucky and privileged enough to have resources to do the same.
Finally, what is one more thing we can do at UCSF? Sign up to learn more. Bakar Institute faculty and staff should undergo Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Champion training. These have recently been cancelled due to the COVID-19 crisis, but they will restart: https://differencesmatter.ucsf.edu/when-and-how
I would really be proud to see all of you at DEI Champion training. Maybe a lot of local good can start with just this one small but meaningful step.
For more than 10 weeks, I had been hoping for things to return to normal. But normal isn’t good enough. We need to make things better, whether that means making sure women get a fairer playing field, or figuring out how many of our colleagues are even going to make it to work, when they can’t safely take BART or Uber.
And that certainly means respecting and addressing the continuing racial inequities in our workplace and in our communities.
We should not be looking for things to return to normal.
Normal was never good enough. We should have never been comfortable with normal.
Let’s work together towards making things better, towards social justice.
Atul Butte
Director, Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute
