I’ll never forget this one time, I was basically in the middle of my Ph.D and I had this great opportunity to attend one of the top conferences for people like me, who study bears and manage bears.
It was full of learning and networking and all kinds of stuff. I mean, everything bear-biology. And, at the same time, it was pretty uncomfortable almost every second of the experience. Folks weren’t coming up to me to ask me what project I’m working on or what species of bear I studied or what I was learning, or, congratulate me on a great presentation or anything like that.
Folks kept coming up to me and saying, oh my gosh, it’s so great to see you here. Wow. We’re so glad you’re here. What’s your name? So, where are you from? And then when I would say, well, I drove here from Nevada. I would get well, but where are you, where are you really from?
I even had a person acknowledge that, although Africa had no bears on the entire continent, it was really amazing that I had come. I was the only Black person, let alone Black woman, to attend this conference maybe ever. And I stood out like a sore thumb.
This extra piece, this identity piece, this specific type of strength that me and people like me have to bring every day… It’s hard, for sure.
I’m Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, and this is a different kind of nature show. A podcast all about the human drama of saving animals. I want to tell you my story and what it’s actually like to track bears in the Sierras, chase lemurs in Madagascar, live with lions in Tanzania, and do all of that as a Black female scientist. This is “Going Wild.”
One of the things that we’re doing so well in this podcast in conveying is, you know, the roadblocks, the stumbling bits, the, you know, the real parts, along with the triumphs and the successes and the awards and the discoveries.
And I want to make sure that people understand that it hasn’t all been adventure. The hardest parts of my life haven’t necessarily been getting sick or not finding the animal. A lot of the hardest moments of my life have been because of who I am and the group of people that I come from. And that’s not fair.
I hope that some of these stories are shocking and can really shock people into action.
You know, soon after graduate school, I had this wonderful, wonderful opportunity at this major institution. And, the actual physical building was organized in an interesting way, where it was about eight stories tall, and the first four stories were open to the public. And then the upper four stories were very, very private. So they were for, you know, the scientists, you know, the lab assistants, where the real science work was done.
The elevators, although they’d go from public to private floors, you have to have specific badges to get to the upper floors. There was a lot of restricted access. I couldn’t go everywhere. That was my work place! And it was just this incredibly inspiring place, you know, full of people doing some of the world’s greatest work and fairly often when I’d go to the fifth floor and step out of the elevator and would walk down these long halls, other folks on the hall would stop me and say, oh, excuse me ma’am, this floor is for scientists only.
I remember the first time it happened, I was super confused like, oh, did I get off on the wrong floor? Oh, why would they think that I’m someone from the public? Or is it because I’m new? Is it because I’m, this is it because I’m that? And then it happened with enough regularity, different people each time, that I realized, oh, I don’t look like what they think a scientist looks like.
I had been told I was in the wrong place, I don’t know, eight or 10 times, you know, in one year, and I remember this one particular moment, I had two of my interns with me. And there’s a woman who was waiting for the elevator on the fifth floor and getting ready to come in. And when she saw me, she said, oh, excuse me, ma’am, I’m sorry. This floor is for scientists only. And she put her hand on my chest and pushed me back into the elevator.
It was really different because in all of the other experiences I’d had, I had taken the time out to explain, oh yes, like I’m a scientist. I’m Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, I’ve been working here for three years, I blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But this time I didn’t. This time, I was, I mean, I remember being extra angry, extra offended. And I pushed her aside and she called after me and she said, no, excuse me, you don’t belong here. This is a private space for scientists.
We walked down the hallway and I remember trying to like, hold my chin up high. And it sounded like, you know, the elevator doors closed and I didn’t know if she had gotten on the elevator or not. I didn’t know if she was calling security or not, but I remember I deliberately was telling myself, you know, Rae, hold your head up. And I was like blinking back these tears. And I stayed in front of my interns because I didn’t want them to see me upset.
The next day at work we had a staff meeting and I brought this up at the staff meeting. And I remember that my higher-ups in the staff meeting were super apologetic. Oh, we’re so sorry this happened. Oh my gosh. It’s unbelievable. We’re sorry. We’re sorry. But no one had a solution. No one had an action item or like, an energy to do something. And I could think of a million things to be done. I could think of an all-staff meeting, you know, I could think of a kind of passive aggressive posting of posters all over the hallway that says, “This woman is a scientist and she belongs here!” But instead, you know, I got a lot of profuse apologies. And so it didn’t stop.
If anything, I feel like I grew to be this resentful, uptight, angry, easily-triggered person in the workplace because whether I was having a good day, a bad day, a triumphant day, or, you know, whatever, it would be cut down in a way that I wouldn’t be able to predict. At any moment, someone could suggest to me that I look like someone who in no way has a place on this floor of highly-credible, super-engaged, world-renowned scientists. And yet that’s exactly what I was.
Things like getting told you don’t belong or being asked about where you’re from, those are examples of microaggressions. Getting pushed into an elevator is a little different. That’s more of a macro-aggression. And that’s because microaggressions are different, usually small or subtle ways that racism shows up, and are typically non-violent. And so they can be kind of swept under the rug or easily excused by the perpetrator, but they leave such a lasting effect, that they can be extremely damaging.
One time I heard someone compare microaggressions to mosquito bites. If you get one mosquito bite one day, it’s going to be really annoying and it’s going to bother you and it’s going to be irritating your skin all day, but it’s not going to throw your whole day off. But what if you got a mosquito bite in the same part of your body every single day for a week, a month, a year? You wouldn’t be able to take it. You might freak out. You might melt down. You might explode. You might go on a rampage trying to destroy every mosquito in sight. But what people on the outside would see is one woman getting one mosquito bite and losing her mind and not understanding why that happened. What they wouldn’t see is that you’ve been bitten by this mosquito in this same super-sensitive place on your body every single day and you’ve just been dealing with it and dealing with it until you can’t anymore.
Microaggressions are something I’ve had to deal with throughout my entire career. And I have tons of stories. I have been at banquets where I am the one getting an award and as I walked through the banquet space, I’ve had people hand me their dirty plates because they think that I am the cleanup staff. I have been mistaken so many times for the wife or the girlfriend of Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, but it couldn’t possibly be me.
I’ll never forget the very first Skype interview I had with a production company to talk about maybe putting together a nature show. We had been emailing back and forth for a couple of weeks. We finally set up a Skype interview and I logged on and I saw the producer there waiting for me. And he looked at the screen and he said, oh, oh, I’m so sorry. Oh, I must have logged into the wrong meeting. And I said, oh, okay, no problem. I’m here for a Skype interview. And he looked at his notes and he said, are you Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant? And I said yes. And he said, oh, I’m so sorry. I was expecting an old white guy. And I said, well, do you still want to do the interview? And he had to regroup for a second and he kind of apologized and we went through with it and I never heard from him again.
I think one of the things I want to drive home is that as I have progressed in my career in stature and status, like this hasn’t stopped. You know, it continues, it follows along. And that sets my experiences apart from lots of other people, in particular white people in my field who, you know, might be mistaken for a student, or it might be, you know, thought of as junior for a while. But eventually that disappears. There is this important intersection of race and gender that creates really painful microaggressions that follow me and I can’t escape them and they hurt and they limit my capacity to do the work that I want to do that is ultimately to help the planet.
This next story is a bit different from the others, because it’s a story about the way I felt after something happened in society that I could not control. And one of the reasons that this story is coming last is also because I think it offers some really solid solutions to be able to act and to know what to do to improve the situation and help prevent it from happening in the future.
This story takes place in 2014 when I was at the tail end of my Ph.D and my work had just been accepted into one of the nation’s major ecology conferences.
At that point I had been studying black bears near lake Tahoe out west for about four years. And I had applied to this conference at least once before, but I think twice, and I had always been rejected. But this time, I actually got my work accepted to the conference and that was a really big deal because it essentially kind of validated the quality of my work. And so I was super excited and really, really, really proud of myself. And at the same time, I became super intimidated because in my department, I had never felt like I was as good or as smart as many of my peers.
And I definitely know, I didn’t necessarily have the supreme respect of some of the top professors in my department that other people had, but I felt like this conference was the great equalizer. Like anyone who had got accepted into the conference and who delivered a really good presentation would be considered a top student in the program. And I was so ready to achieve, but I also knew that I had to do extra well because I was Black. Because I didn’t know a single other Black person that was going to be there. And that the last thing I wanted was to be the new Black girl who does terribly.
That was a lot of pressure.
What I was interested in is, what parts of the landscape have higher rates of human-induced mortality for black bears. In my study site, we were losing a bear or two every day to some sort of human-induced mortality. Which is a really big deal, especially when we’re trying to grow the bear population, not shrink it.
My presentation was going to be about data, about patterns, about maps. And I really wanted to somehow have the essence and the soul of a bear there with me to really kind of drive my point home.
I had a bear skull. And what was unique about it is that it had a hole right in the upper right part of the head, near the brain. It was a bullet hole in the skull, and this bear had been shot by a person, and it had been hunted illegally, so poached, essentially. It was this kind of gnarly example of, you know, this big, beautiful, fuzzy, cuddly animal also gets shot in the head all the time.
The conference was in August of 2014 and the day before the conference started, I drove to my hotel in order to prepare for my talk.
As I was driving to the hotel, I was listening to NPR. They were describing a story that had just taken place where a young man, a teenager named Michael Brown, was unarmed on a walk and was shot and killed by a police officer in Missouri. And the city of Ferguson, Missouri had erupted into what the news was describing, as riots. It seemed that there was violence. There was fire. There was anger and tension. And the community in Ferguson was grieving the loss of one of their own.
As I was driving towards this conference, this conference where I did not expect to see another Black face in this group of literally thousands of ecologists, I got overwhelmed with the injustice and the unfairness and the isolation and the grief.
I got to my hotel room, threw my things down and sobbed. I cried so much that it was like deep, guttural, tragically emotional cries. I was so overcome with grief because of history, because it was all just repeating itself. It didn’t start with Trayvon Martin in 2013. It started in 1619 when the first Black people were brought over. Death and violence and murder has been a constant.
If I felt that Black life didn’t matter, certainly in that moment, I felt that I didn’t matter. My presentation didn’t matter, my existence in this conference where I was expecting to be the only Black person didn’t matter, but also that it was hopeless. What was the point of getting a Ph.D if, you know, my dad or my husband, or I could just be shot on the street one day for being Black? What was the point of doing all of this work?
I just cried. And I remember crawling into bed in the early evening. I didn’t eat dinner. I didn’t practice my presentation. And I woke up in the morning to my alarm and to my overwhelming anxiety that I had to get up, immediately go to this conference, and present, even though I was completely unprepared (A), and (B), even though this horrible, horrible thing had still just happened. And Ferguson was in even more of a chaotic state than it had been before. Now, every news station was tuned into Ferguson. Now every social media conversation was about what was going on.
It was like everyone was talking about it… Except at the conference.
I walked to the room where I was giving my presentation and I remember being horrified because it was a very large room.
Why didn’t I excuse myself from the presentation? Listen, first of all, I should have. And second of all, I felt like I didn’t have an excuse. You know, the Rae that’s telling the story today feels absolutely like showing up, Black, for work right after the Black community has been terrorized, is nearly impossible. And it is a reason, not even an excuse, a reason to not be able to perform one’s best. But back then, I didn’t feel like I had an excuse. I had never seen that be acceptable or even acknowledged as, you know, a barrier towards performance or being able to do well at work. I assumed that if I bowed out, I would be reprimanded, maybe even to the point that I would lose my status as a graduate student.
And so I walked up and I remember internally, my stomach was in a knot and my heart was beating fast and I was taking all those shallow breaths. But I think that I walked up pretty elegantly and I began my presentation.
There were some easy parts. Like, I could introduce myself quite well. I could acknowledge the professors that were in the audience that were a part of my department quite well.
But once I got into the methods, oh, I mean, this is where my mind actually kind of goes blank. And thank goodness because I really don’t want to relive that embarrassment. I stumbled. I fumbled so much that I remember just vaguely kind of excusing myself. I was the only one talking, you know? oh, I’m so sorry. I’m just going to move on. Oh, I don’t, I -I’m sorry. I keep messing up. I’m just going to move to the next section. I mean, I’m positive that it was probably painful for the audience to watch.
I got to the end where, essentially, I was able to say, black bears are being killed, left and right at the hands of humans in all of these different ways. And I pulled out my bear skull and I held it up in front of everybody. But I turned it around and pointed at this one specific spot in the skull. And I said, this is a bullet hole in the skull of one of my study animals. We don’t know who killed this bear or why, but we do know that it is just one of many examples of how human beings are causing direct mortality to black bears in my study region. And we, as scientists, cannot feel confident that the population of bears has a future and will persist on this landscape unless we’re able to manage human-induced mortality to these animals.
And that’s how I ended.
In my mind and in my heart, I felt so ashamed that I was spending my time and my energy on this very day, that Ferguson was burning down, talking about the death of black bears at the hands of humans and how that needed to be controlled, managed, and eradicated when the death of Black human men and women in our country, people, people like me, people like my family members wasn’t being properly addressed and justice wasn’t being served and how I could be doing something about it. I felt very much like I could be putting my energy towards this. I could be standing on a podium talking about this. This matters more than the lives of bears. At least for me.
I picked up my bag and I excused myself and I walked out into the larger hallway of the conference where thousands of people were milling about and chit chatting with one another and sipping their coffee. And I took one last look for another Black face and without seeing any, I left. I was supposed to stay at the conference for many more days, but I couldn’t.
No one ever approached me, no one ever said to my face, Oh yeah. I was in that audience, you know, and Rae really messed up. What was up with her that day? but no one ever said anything to me. And I didn’t say anything.
At the time, at least for me, it was like I was either being Black and addressing the injustice, or I was being a scientist and there was no space for that.
Which is something that a lot of Black folks, especially in their professional spaces, have to deal with. Because often there’s this, there’s a cost to raising your voice about racism. There’s a social cost. There’s a professional cost. And we kind of know that, and it’s hard enough to exist in your Black professional space. And so you really want to do everything you can to keep it safe. So this is a tension that a lot of folks feel and that I felt for a long, long time.
But a couple years later, I had reached my personal tipping point. And it was definitely helped along by becoming very close with a couple of other Black scientists. I was able to clearly see and begin to articulate that the intersections of my identity were actually the answer to what was needed. And that was a supportive, conscious, scientific community rooted in justice and anti-racism work.
Any problem is better solved by a diverse group of people, but you can’t just have racially diverse faces at the table solving a problem. Anyone in that position needs to be empowered, needs to have equal opportunity and their basic, basic needs met. And if a community is absolutely on fire or facing violence or injustice, then those needs aren’t met and that needs to be focused on first, before we can move to those next stages of focusing on solving the world’s problems.
Once all of those things came together in my mind and in my heart and in my soul, I got really brave and started articulating this more widely. I would do it at science conferences. I would do it at public speaking events. I would do it in casual spaces where I interacted with my colleagues. I would make sure that as racial violence in the Black community continued to roll out, I wouldn’t be silent about it. I would demand that there be conversations and acknowledgements.
And it’s interesting also to be telling this story today in 2021, because I have to say many, if not most of my environmental science organizations that I work with or work for, do have these conversations now, but there’s more work to be done. There’s way, way, way, way, way more.
One of the reasons that I still want to tell this story is because I know there’s still people out there who may need to hear it this way, may need to be given encouragement in this way to, to act, to do, to support, to raise a voice or raise a hand or step in, or, you know, hold and support. And it also opened me to seeing how so many other groups of people have so many other issues that also need to be addressed.
And let me tell you, that’s a journey that I’m still on. I am still working, so, so, so hard to see and fight for the needs of other target groups, but I’m dedicated to it. And I know that it only strengthens the bigger goals that I have and that so many people have of using science to make the planet a better, healthier, more balanced place.
You just listened to season one of Going Wild with Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant.
Going Wild is a brand new podcast and one of the first ever from PBS Nature. So now, we want to hear from you. What did you think of the podcast? What was your favorite episode? What kinds of stories would you want to hear in season two? Do you even want a season two? Let us know! You can leave us a review on whatever podcast app you’re using to listen to these credits right now, or you can send us an email at naturepod@wnet.org
You can also find me Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook.
Since this is the last episode of the season, I want to say, thanks to you. Hosting the show and sharing my stories has been an incredible experience and quite a wild ride and I’m so glad that you’re here on this journey with me.
I also want to say thank you to our amazing Going Wild team: Rachel Aronoff, Nathan Tobey, Great Feeling Studios and Nature’s digital lead, Danielle Broza for the production help, Jakob Lewis and Stacia Brown for your feedback on this episode, and Carriad Harmon for the sound design.
Special thanks to nature’s social team, Amanda Schmidt, Jayne Lisi, Chelsey Saatkamp, Natasha Padilla, and Karen Ho. To the design team for the artwork for the show, Arianna Bollers and Karen Brazell, And to our amazing lawyer, Blanche Robertson.
Finally, an extra special thanks to Nature’s executive producer, Fred Kaufman, for supporting this project and our team from day one.
Going Wild is a new podcast by PBS Nature. Nature is an award-winning series created by the WNET Group and made possible by all of you. Funding for this podcast was provided by grants from the Anderson Family Charitable Trust and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
