All Good People

A critical history of STEM DEI, the twenty-first century reforms of education and work that sustain very old systems of differing people, deserving different lives. In All Good People, Amy Slaton provides the first extended historical study of STEM DEI, a concerted effort by educational, corporate, governmental, and philanthropic sectors in recent decades to address the disproportionate participation of majority individuals in U.S. science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Unlike educational or workforce policy studies of minority experiences in STEM, this book follows the historical roots of American faith in technoscience as a scaffold for democratic values: the belief that the U.S. is at heart a meritocracy where anyone of talent can succeed. Despite the well-intentioned reforms of recent DEI initiatives, the outcome has been an extremely slow rate of change in participation by Black, Brown, female, LGBTQAI+ and disabled communities in STEM. The author traces what has counted as STEM talent, prevailing ideas about learning and productivity, and the epistemic features of technoscience to find not insincerity or even simply under-resourcing as the causes of this social stasis, but a national commitment to upholding the stratified and ultimately unjust character of the industrial polity—what scholars and activists have long described as a system of racial capitalism. The book aims to create possibilities for new forms of dialogue on the nature of fairness in the twenty-first century U.S.