By Anna Gibson

News anchor Angela Green was recently in the spotlight because of a video she posted on her Facebook page. In it, Green gives her personal advice to an intern with blond curly hair. She suggests that the intern was told that her hair was too “distracting” and “unprofessional.” In response to this, Green suggested that the intern straighten her hair just this once for a school assignment to please everyone involved.

by Uche Wogwugwu on Medium

Last month, I was suddenly and suspiciously let go from my job at a local media production company in Houston. Prior to being let go, I’d been in New York City for a couple of days hoping to retrieve the last of my things left there over a year ago.

I am a Black woman who is no longer in the STEM fields, but it isn’t for the reasons you may be thinking.

Growing up, I frequently disassembled and reassembled electronics around the house and while my mother was frustrated at first, she soon relented. My interest in the inner workings of household gadgets were a part of my larger interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Though the tinkering I did at home prepared me for the education I would later receive in a top-notch engineering program, there just wasn’t anything out there to prepare me for the racism and isolation I would feel during college and in my STEM career. But it wasn’t just the discrimination on-the-job that convinced me to move out of STEM fields and into the social sciences. I chose to become an ex Black woman in STEM because the privilege my job granted left me feeling complicit in larger systems of racial exclusion in the United States.

White. Male. Middle-Aged.

Despite the year being 2015, this remains the prototype of professorship at most colleges and universities in the U.S. Those who exist outside this identity are often devalued in higher education and prone to a series of unpleasantries that many of us know as microaggressions.

by Tracie Powell for All Digitocracy