https://www.wired.com/story/the-unwritten-laws-of-physics/
I rode high on those words when, in 2016, I arrived at UChicago, one of the top physics departments in the country. I was one of two Black women in a department of about 200 grad students. It quickly became clear that she and I were novelties. “I’ve dated a mulatto like you before,” a peer told me in an attempt to make conversation. When I showed up at a weekly meeting that discussed articles in scientific journals, a professor handed me an abandoned backpack near his seat—as if the only reason I could be in that room was to collect a forgotten bag. (He blushed when I shook my head and sat down.) Another time, my adviser asked me to pose for a picture for his grant application. “Of course, I have other photos,” he said as he tossed me a wrench. “But it looks better if it’s a woman.”
One day, worn out by always feeling like an alien, I opened my laptop and poked around the department website. I was searching for signs of Black women who had come before me—to reassure myself that someone had once done what I was trying to do. No luck. So I turned to Google, where I stumbled on a database simply titled The Physicists, maintained by an organization called African American Women in Physics.
I sorted the catalog by graduation year. A few rows down the first page, I saw the name of a UChicago physicist: Willetta Greene-Johnson, who defended her dissertation in 1987. I scrolled through the next page, and the next, and kept scrolling until I finally reached another UChicago entry in 2015. Her name was Cacey Stevens Bester.
That can’t be it, I thought. That meant I was on track to be number three.