Ebony McGee: Dismantling Racism in STEM
When Ebony McGee was working as a competitive intelligence engineering analyst for a power products company, she would drive to her office every morning, her hands gripping the steering wheel tightly, shaking more the closer she got to work. She appeared to have a successful career. She had earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a master’s in industrial engineering, had a well-paying job in her field, was living close to New York City, had a thriving social life and many friends—and yet, McGee says she was miserable.
„I was going through something mentally that I wasn’t able to understand or process at the time,“ McGee recalls. „I had to do mental preparation just to walk into the office. Every day, I was experiencing racism, sometimes subtle and sometimes blatant. I didn’t have the language to talk about it then, but I was experiencing what is now known as racial battle fatigue.“
Racial battle fatigue, a term coined by social psychologist William Smith in 2003, describes the psychosocial stress responses experienced by people of color resulting from facing racially hostile environments and individuals. Driven by a desire to understand if other high-achieving, academically successful Black and brown individuals were having similar experiences that she was, McGee decided to pursue a PhD.
„I started my work looking at high achievement in STEM for Black people in particular, and racially minoritized folks in general,“ McGee says. „I wanted a counter narrative of resilience and perseverance to the dominant narrative that racially minoritized folks aren’t interested in STEM, or that we fail or drop out. That simply isn’t the reality. Having gone to a Historically Black College (North Carolina A&T State University), I was around hundreds of STEMmers who had since graduated and had really thriving careers and economic stability, and these stories weren’t being told.“
In addition to stories of success, however, McGee also found that many students were struggling with what she first thought might be mental fatigue. Her work revealed that something insidious was happening to Black and other racially marginalized students in STEM. When she asked students in interviews to recall a time they felt like they were treated unfairly, individuals who had just moments before confidently run down a list of their awards and accolades would break down, and McGee would have to stop the interview and, in several cases, walk them to a counselor’s office out of fear for their mental well-being. She says this experience changed her personal and academic trajectory.
„The culture in STEM academic spaces can be toxic for everybody—being rewarded for not sleeping, not eating, cots in the lab, competition between peers—but hearing narratives from Black and other racially minoritized students, it’s clear that many of their experiences are very racialized, and that this is creating racial trauma,“ McGee says. „STEM culture helps perpetuate racialized stereotypes, ideologies, and biases. Marginalized students not only have to bear the brunt of its toxic culture, but these racialized experiences position them as impostors, leading them to lack a sense of belonging in these spaces, and despite high achievement, feeling like they are perpetually auditioning for something their peers are not auditioning for.“
McGee has since dedicated her career to understanding and dismantling racism in STEM. She investigates what it means to be racially marginalized while minoritized in the context of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) higher education and professions. She studies how racialized biases and marginalization impact graduate and career trajectories for high-achieving historically marginalized students, including Black, indigenous, Latino, and Asian individuals. She has led groundbreaking work linking STEM educational experiences with racial trauma—the cumulative effects of racism on an individual’s mental and physical health—showing the social, economic, and health costs of racialized stereotypes. McGee has shown that racialized marginalization results in many forms of racial trauma, including psychological stress and impostor phenomenon—a feeling of self-doubt of intellect, skills, or accomplishments among high-achieving individuals.
McGee has joined Johns Hopkins University as a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Innovation and Inclusion in the STEM Ecosystem. She will hold primary appointments in the School of Education and in the Department of Mental Health in the Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is also part of the Advancing Racial Equity in Health, Housing, and Education cluster.
Resilience and wellness in STEM fields
McGee also investigates resiliency, wellness, and identity development in high-achieving people of color in STEM. As she began to understand more about resilience, she concluded that resilience without unique sources of support is simply asking Black and brown folks to deal with their own oppression. She published a book in 2020 titled Black, Brown, Bruised: How Racialized STEM Education Stifles Innovation that proposes key reforms to STEM education. McGee’s proposed reforms fundamentally pivot away from current strategies that seek to modify students, faculty, or staff. Instead, she emphasizes the need for structural changes in our educational systems. Her approach operates on the belief that systemic institutional barriers are not mere individual characteristics that can be ameliorated through resilience or mentoring. By shifting the focus toward structural changes, she argues that a more equitable and inclusive STEM education for Black and brown students can be realized. This systemic methodology targets the root causes of racial disparities in STEM, rather than attempting to merely manage their symptoms. McGee’s reform seeks to address the deeply entrenched institutional policies and practices that foster racial disparities in education. This approach removes the burden from students and faculty of color from having to navigate and surpass these barriers independently.
„It’s not just mental health, this affects physical health too,“ says McGee. „High effort coping against racism kills slowly—you can literally work yourself to death. High-achieving Black folks are dying at accelerated rates at younger ages than their white peers, and there is something wrong with that. When someone dies young, people say, ‚Look at all they accomplished.‘ How dare they say that when people don’t even have time to enjoy it? What we’re saying to Black folks is ‚If you earn the degree, we’ll give you the accolade, a nice office, but you won’t live long.‘ I think there’s a different message that needs to be said, and my goal is to craft that message, because going to work shouldn’t make you sick.“
Building bridges
The Bloomberg Distinguished Professorship (BDP) Clusters initiative consists of faculty-developed interdisciplinary clusters that are recruiting new BDPs and junior faculty members to Johns Hopkins to conduct transformational research in crucial fields. The Advancing Racial Equity in Health, Housing, and Education cluster seeks to make Johns Hopkins the world leader in solution-focused practices and policies to promote racial justice in health, housing, and education for young people. McGee says the cluster’s focus on housing as a central issue is crucial in order to move racial equity forward.
„Thinking of housing as a centric and structural issue, and taking into account the damage—historical and contemporary—of housing segregation is groundbreaking, because housing segregation is the key to everything, but has been sort of on the periphery in many educational spaces,“ McGee says. „We need to look at and understand all of these really complex, multidisciplinary factors, from prenatal to old age, in order to start thinking about the entire human ecosystem to solve our problems within and beyond STEM.“
At Johns Hopkins, McGee is excited for the opportunity to expand her work through new partnerships and collaborations, in particular with experts in the field of mental health, which she says will help her tackle topics she has been working on for a long time.
„I’m really excited to collaborate with mental health experts because I think it will take my research into great new directions,“ McGee says. „I’ve been theorizing and writing about mental health for a while. My first article on mental health and high-achieving Black students in STEM was published in 2015 and predicted the current mental health crisis we’re seeing in college students today. Listen to Black women. While there is now increased attention on the mental health of STEMmers, and people are starting to talk about the stress of innovation and of risk-taking, people are rarely talking about how racism impacts STEM education and workplaces for marginalized folks. I now get to do this kind of work alongside eminent scholars who are mental health experts, using the latest and greatest methods and measures in the field.“
Additionally, McGee recently founded Racial Revolutionary and Inclusive Guidance for Health Throughout STEM (R-RIGHTS), a project that aims to dismantle systemic racism and other barriers and promote equitable representation in the STEM fields. Through innovative strategies, collaborative partnerships, and unwavering dedication, the group strives to empower underrepresented racial and ethnic communities, fostering a diverse and inclusive ecosystem that accelerates advancements in educational and workplace mental and physical health to transform the future of STEM.
Afrofuturism in STEM
While much of McGee’s work to date has focused on the experiences of people of color in higher education, she is particularly looking forward to turning her attention to the workplace.
„I want to position STEM companies to prioritize understanding issues of wellness within their workplace,“ McGee says. „In order to get these companies on board, it’s important to think about interest convergence—it’s not just about helping Black people. For companies to make a change, it has to help their bottom line. That bottom line is retention. One of the retention issues for many STEM companies is that they can’t retain Black employees because the environment is hostile. So making your workplace a place of wellness is a retention issue. If folks are happier, healthier, and enjoy going to work, you will be able to retain these folks.“
McGee says she finds inspiration in Afrofuturism—a cultural aesthetic, philosophy of science, and history that explores the intersection of African diaspora culture, imagination, science, technology, art, the future, and liberation. Afrofuturism celebrates, illuminates, and uplifts individuals within and beyond the African diaspora.
„With the blooming of Afrofuturism in STEM, I have a renewed sense of hope and desire to see a future where Black and brown people aren’t just working for STEM companies, but they’re creating and leading new STEM companies,“ McGee says. „Right now, a lot of Black and brown folks are getting attention for mentorship, being a role model, being on a website’s home page. That’s the icing, but let’s not forget about the cake: We don’t want to just be somebody’s role model. We are theory makers, knowledge builders, and we contribute theory and knowledge to STEM.“
McGee is currently working on her second book, which will present equity ethics as a key framework for transforming STEM to help reverse—rather than exacerbate—global climate change and thereby maintain human survival on the planet. McGee defines „equity ethics“ as fundamental principles guiding behavior and action toward justice, especially racial justice, and rectifying racial inequities through the employment of one’s STEM abilities.
„My research shows that many STEMmers of color are motivated by equity ethics,“ McGee explains. „STEM companies have been a large part of the climate disaster, making decisions based in competition and capitalism, killing people through pollution and waste with almost complete impunity. Many Black and brown STEMmers and other minoritized folks feel a strong sense of responsibility to help their communities, and they want to solve pressing issues like climate change and other global atrocities using STEM in a way that is cooperative, empathetic, harmonious with nature, and less pollutive to make the planet a better, more culturally affirming place, and there is a crisis level need for more of that in STEM.“
McGee comes to JHU from Vanderbilt University, where she was a professor of diversity and STEM education in the Peabody College of Education. She also co-founded and led the Explorations in Diversifying Engineering Faculty Initiative (EDEFI), whose mission is to investigate institutional, technical, social, and cultural factors that affect outcomes for African American students and professionals in STEM.
McGee earned her Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University, an HBCU, her Master of Science in industrial engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and her PhD in curriculum and instruction with a focus on mathematics education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She completed postdoctoral fellowships in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago and in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University before joining the faculty at Vanderbilt University.
„Dr. McGee is a groundbreaking thinker, and by working to transform STEM she is helping to build a more just world,“ says Bloomberg School of Public Health Dean Ellen J. MacKenzie. „Her efforts to address racist structures in educational spaces is crucial to the future of Johns Hopkins, and to the Bloomberg School’s core mission of training and nurturing a diverse public health workforce to save lives globally.“
Adds Christopher Morphew, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Education: „Dr. McGee is one of a small number of world-class education scholars who not only raise the bar on what we know, but also put knowledge into practice through real-world solutions. Her BDP appointment, and the connections it brings across Hopkins, will give her more opportunities to expand her work and improve how our nation’s educational institutions support under-represented students.“
As a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, McGee joins an interdisciplinary cohort of scholars working to address major world problems and teach the next generation. The program is backed by support from Bloomberg Philanthropies.