Addressing Anti-Black Racism in Our Departments

In April 2021, the PBS Newshour ran a story with the headline ``Even as colleges pledge to improve, share of engineering graduates who are Black declines''. Indeed, there is a dearth of Black students in our mathematics classrooms. A 2018 study by the Pew Research Center found that Black students earned just 7 percent of STEM bachelor's degrees. Unfortunately, this is an issue for our faculty as well. A 2017 report in Inside Higher Ed states that there has been an increase over time in the diversity of senior and junior faculty members in the STEM fields -- except black faculty. A New York Times article, titled ``For a Black Mathematician, What It’s Like to Be the `Only One' '', quoted that there are just a dozen black mathematicians among nearly 2,000 tenured faculty members in the nation’s top 50 math departments.

What can we as faculty members do to make our mathematics departments more welcoming and diverse for Black students and faculty alike? These are daunting problems, and many with an interest in presenting solutions do not even have tenure! In this interactive presentation, we present some practices that even tenure-track faculty can engage in to showcase how #BlackLivesMatter -- from increasing the number of pathways for majors, to building community by conducting research with students, and having hard conversations within hiring committees.