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Black Americans’ COVID vaccine hesitancy stems more from today’s inequities than historical ones

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UCLA study urges medical community to pursue changes that build better trust

Woman receives vaccine shot

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Holly Ober | October 27, 2022

Key takeaways:
• Doctors and distrust. Black Americans are more likely than whites to report poor interactions with their physicians.
• Not history but here and now. These personal experiences — rather than wrongs of the past — tend to heighten their distrust of the health care system and lead to skepticism about COVID-19 vaccines.

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the vaccination rate in the Black community lagged well behind that of whites, a gap many in the media speculated was the result of fears based on historical health-related injustices like the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

But new research by UCLA psychologists shows that vaccine hesitancy and mistrust of medical professionals among Black Americans may hinge more on their current unsatisfactory health care experiences than on their knowledge of past wrongs.

The findings, the researchers say, clearly illustrate the need for both broad and specific changes within the medical community to improve experiences and build better trust with Black patients. The research is published in the journal Health Psychology.

“History is important, no doubt, but Black Americans do not have to reach into the past for examples of inequity in health care — many have experienced it themselves,” said Kimberly Martin, who led the research as a UCLA doctoral student and is now a UC President’s Postdoctoral Scholar at UC San Francisco.

In the first of two studies, Martin and her UCLA colleagues surveyed approximately 300 Black and white participants in December 2020, just as vaccines were becoming available. Black respondents expressed less trust in medical professionals and reported significantly less positive experiences with the health care system than their white counterparts. They were also less likely to report an intention to get vaccinated.

Participants were also queried about their familiarity with the 1932–72 Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which the U.S. government studied Black men with syphilis without their informed consent and intentionally withheld treatment, leading to medical complications, fatalities and transmission of the disease to family members. Some 66% of Black participants and 62% of white participants said they were familiar with the study, though Black participants generally knew more about it. Familiarity, however, was not associated with greater medical mistrust or vaccine hesitancy in either group, the researchers found.

Ultimately, the authors concluded, Black respondents’ trust in medical professionals had been undermined by a lack of positive health care experiences, contributing to a hesitancy to get vaccinated.

“A damaging narrative suggested in popular media has been that Black Americans were less likely to want a COVID-19 vaccination primarily because of the Tuskegee study,” said Martin, who along with her co-researchers found that the study had been mentioned 168 times in TV news reports on vaccine hesitancy between October 2020 and November 2021. “However, Tuskegee is only one of many relevant historical examples of medical mistreatment toward Black Americans, and this framing completely disregards current inequity and injustice in health care.”

Co-author Annette Stanton, a distinguished professor of psychology at UCLA, said implications that Black Americans can and should “get over the past” as a means to reducing health inequities are not only offensive but misguided, given the findings.

“The findings point to Black Americans’ present-day experiences in the medical system as an important factor among multiple contributors to inequities, and physicians and health systems can indeed take action to improve these experiences,” she said. “Respectful, competent and caring medical professionals can be agents of change.”

A second study, conducted several months after the first, surveyed a nationally representative sample of more than 12,750 Black and white Americans and found no statistically significant racial difference in the proportion of those who had been vaccinated or were intending to get vaccinated. But once again, Black participants reported less medical trust than whites. Black respondents also reported feeling less cared-for by their physicians than white respondents, which the researchers said contributes to lower levels of trust.

Among those who were not yet vaccinated, both Black and white participants who had less trust in the medical community and felt less cared-for by their personal physician were also less likely to report an intention to get vaccinated.

The current studies add to an extensive body of research showing that Black Americans have worse health care experiences than whites. And while the vaccination gap between Blacks and whites has decreased, issues of inequitable treatment and medical mistrust remain and need to be addressed in the context of present-day experiences, the researchers emphasized.

“Characterizing race-related disparities in health care experiences as a relic of the past excludes current medical experiences and absolves the current health care system from making needed change,” said co-author Kerri Johnson, a UCLA professor of communication and psychology.

Johnson and the other authors said that going forward, health care professionals and researchers need to identify and implement changes that could provide Black Americans with more equitable and satisfying health care experiences.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

Shirlee Smith, UCLA alumna and creator of Black Boyle Heights Facebook group

UCLA alumna seeks to preserve history of Black Boyle Heights

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Shirlee Smith wants you to know about the Black community that used to live in the neighborhood: ‘We were there.’

Shirlee Smith, UCLA alumna and creator of Black Boyle Heights Facebook group

Shirlee Smith wrote a book about parenting titled “They’re Your Kids, Not Your Friends.” | Courtesy of Shirlee Smith

Nancy Gondo | November 7, 2022

Though Boyle Heights has a storied history as a multi-ethnic enclave of the 20th century, Shirlee Smith has noticed the Black community there often gets overlooked — something the UCLA alumna hopes to change.

“I’ve spent my adult years closing gaping mouths when asked where I’d grown up and my reply was Boyle Heights,” said Smith, 85. “People saw Boyle Heights as Jewish, as Latina, as Japanese. And so, the feedback has been, ‘Oh yes, the world needs to know: We were there.’”

The former Boyle Heights resident is working on a project to document and preserve the history of the Black people who used to live in the neighborhood. In some ways, Smith’s mother had started the legwork by collecting stories from families and entrusting them to one of her granddaughters.

“I read the 20 or so masterpieces and knew our stories had to be brought to light,” Smith said. She published some of the stories in Brooklyn and Boyle magazine, started the Black Boyle Heights Facebook group and in February, organized a virtual event with more than 50 people gathered online to share memories and honor their elders.

‘I’ll Take You There’

The event, called “I’ll Take You There,” honored four former residents who ranged in age from 93 to 101. Smith plans to turn the event into an annual celebration. She’s also collecting photos and stories, locating people, reviewing census data and getting in touch with local historians. Black Boyle Heights’ goals include publishing a directory of where the Black residents lived, setting up a podcast to tell their stories and creating a museum exhibit.

Boyle Heights drew a diverse mix of people in the early 20th century because the neighborhood east of the Los Angeles River was one of the few without restrictive racial covenants. Smith remembers hearing mariachi music up and down the block and walking past the Japanese Baptist church at the intersection of Evergreen and 2nd Street.

She didn’t think much about the diversity of Boyle Heights as a kid. But “as I grew up and interacted with a wide range of people, I discovered that fond memories were the opportunity to know up close people from so many cultures and be part of their traditions,” Smith said.

The close-knit Black community provided a built-in value system. Her next-door neighbor taught her how to knit and embroider; hairdresser Dolores Jones made house calls with straightening combs and curling irons in hand; Daddy Fred and Ma’ Bessie helped watch the neighborhood kids. But if anyone was caught acting out of line, word spread quickly.

“When you did wrong, it wasn’t just that Shirlee Pickett did wrong. It was the Pickett family,” Smith, née Pickett, said. “So when Dolores Jones came to your house to do your hair, you had to be polite. You may not have wanted to get your hair done, but you had to appreciate her.”

The neighborhood makeup started to change in the back half of the 1900s as racial covenants in Los Angeles lifted and families moved out of Boyle Heights. Today, few Black families remain in the now predominantly Latino neighborhood.

Meeting UCLA

Most minority students in Boyle Heights at the time weren’t being prepped for college, according to Smith. There were four paths, called “tracking” — academic, commercial, shop and home economics. Black and Latino girls were often tracked into home economics and commercial, where they would learn how to file papers. Few were put on the academic track.

“UCLA was not on my menu — there was no history,” Smith said. But in 1969, UCLA established the high potential program (now part of the Academic Advancement Program) to identify Black and Chicano students who might not meet the general entry criteria but are likely to succeed at the university. She applied and was accepted. “And that’s how I met UCLA,” she said.

The program started with a year of preparing students for university life. Smith wasn’t your typical college student fresh out of high school. She was a single mother of five children ranging in age from 7 months to 11 years.

“I was 30 years old when I hit the campus, and I had my youngest child in a stroller,” Smith said. “I took her to class with me, and that did not happen in 1968. There was no old lady on campus with a baby.”

As if that wasn’t tough enough, she got a C- on the first paper she wrote. She went to see the instructor, who told her she could redo the paper and gave her a copy of an A+ paper. That was a pivotal learning moment — Smith went on to graduate in 1973 with the distinction Department Scholar in Sociology.

Smith has since worked as a columnist for the Pasadena Star News, produced and hosted a cable TV show and written a book about parenting.

“Without UCLA, I doubt seriously that I would have had the courage to pursue any of my many accomplishments,” she said. “It’s really the reason I became a writer.”

If you’d like to contact Shirlee Smith regarding the Black Boyle Heights project:
info@blackboyleheights.org
aanbh1896@gmail.com
(626) 296-2777

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

Professor’s book spotlights legacy of Mexican political organizers in the American West

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Kelly Lytle Hernández’s ‘Bad Mexicans’ comes at a time when L.A.’s politics reckon with racism

Bad Mexicans book cover and Kelly Lytle Hernández

Kelly Lytle Hernández, author and Thomas E. Lifka Professor of History at UCLA.

Madeline Adamo | November 29, 2022

Editor’s note: This page was updated on Nov. 30 to correct the name of the center that organized the talk.

Written with the pacing and drama of a spy novel, historian Kelly Lytle Hernández’s latest book, “Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands,” aims to illuminate the far-too-overlooked story of the magonistas, a group of dissidents who were organizing in Mexico at the turn of the 20th century to oust dictator Porfirio Díaz.

Led by radicalized journalist Ricardo Flores Magón, who communicated with his followers through Regeneración, the newspaper he founded in 1900, the magonistas fled Mexico after years of suppression and regrouped in the U.S. borderlands. Most of them set up in Los Angeles, where they relaunched their rebel newspaper and incited an army of migrant workers and cotton pickers — a cause of great concern for governments in the U.S. that had great investments in Díaz’s Mexico.

Díaz, who called the magonistas “bad” Mexicans (or malos Mexicanos), pursued their leader with the help of the U.S. government. Flores Magón evaded capture until 1907, after which he spent his final years in and out of prison. Though his story isn’t widely known, historians have long credited the magonistas’ efforts with eventually leading to Díaz’s ousting.

“‘Bad Mexicans’ tells the story of how (the magonistas) built their social movement here in the United States,” Lytle Hernández told the audience (some who joined virtually from regions around Mexico) at a recent event focused on her book. “And probably more important, it’s the story of that cross-border counterinsurgency campaign that tried to stop them, but they were successful, and they incited the outbreak of the 1910 Mexican Revolution.”

The UCLA Center for Mexican Studies invited Lytle Hernández, who is the the Thomas E. Lifka Professor of History at UCLA, to speak with Fernando Pérez-Montesinos, assistant professor of history, who dove into why the historian chose to write about Mexican “reveltosos.”

“I’m a border-lander,” said Lytle Hernández, who recalls being alarmed that she was only just learning about the magonistas and their rebel movement as a doctoral student at UCLA. She recognized the importance of their place in American history and was concerned that people currently living in the borderlands — generally people of color, laborers and organizers — didn’t know these stories.

The book’s origin story comes from Lytle Hernández’s previous book, “City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965,” which was a compelling account that places contemporary issues of mass incarceration and mass deportation within a much broader historical context.

Using archival evidence, Lytle Hernández established that Los Angeles — “a hub of incarceration” that imprisons more people than any other city in the country that imprisons the most people in the world — has been the site of various manifestations of human caging. In documenting how this reality is inextricably bound to conquest, settler colonialism, institutional racism and structural assaults on the working poor, irrespective of race or ethnicity, Lytle Hernández had all the research and material she needed to write “Bad Mexicans.”

While “Bad Mexicans” arose from a personal place for Lytle Hernández, she says the book also served as a response to politics at the time of the project’s genesis. More specifically, the 2016 presidential debate, when former president Donald Trump famously referred to Mexican immigrants as “bad hombres” while speaking about his plan for a southern border wall.

“When Trump made his disparaging remarks about Mexican migrants who are doing nothing but trying to secure a better life for themselves, he was stirring up that rhetorical pot of racial violence,” said Lytle Hernández, who is also the director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies.

The historian chose “Bad Mexicans” as the title of her book, playing off Trump’s remark in hope that the general public would understand that by using that kind of language, the former president was setting the stage for anti-Mexican and anti-Latino racial violence.

To connect the reader to a form of racial violence they might be familiar with, Lytle Hernández opens the book with the scene of the 1910 lynching of Antonio Rodríguez in Texas.

“They lit the pyre and watched him burn,” said Lytle Hernández, reciting the first sentence of her book to show how the scene is used as an “anchor” for American readers. She hopes readers use what they know about lynching to make the connections to Mexican themes and experiences and their important place in the “American story,” she said.

The story goes on to use a Hollywood-like approach to smuggle in Mexican history; including armed battles, deciphering of secret codes, betrayals and love affairs. In doing so, Lytle Hernández says that “Bad Mexicans” rebuilds the legacy of Mexican and Mexican American identity in the country’s canon of history.

“Where do Mexicans fit in the U.S. racial dynamics?” said Lytle Hernández. “That has been a contest around whiteness and non-whiteness in particular.”

At the heart of the book, Lytle Hernández invites further conversations on race formations in the U.S., which she says have been largely defined by struggles over land and politics.

“What is the relationship of Mexicanas to Black folks? To Indigenous folks? Where are they going to fall in this historical set of relationships and power?” she said.

Despite the book being published in May, the discussion was particularly relevant because of the recent outcry in Los Angeles over racist comments made by three Latino city council members.

“This crisis is an opportunity for people to get really clear about where they stand in relationship to capitalism and white supremacy, among other things,” said Lytle Hernández, tying the recent politics back to the topics her book engages with.

The second half of the discussion, which was followed by an audience Q&A, explored the history of relations between Blacks and Latinos, focusing on connections between the Black freedom struggle and the suppression of Mexican radicals like the magonistas.

“We share a history. We share a story and no one ever wants to tell us about it,” Lytle Hernández said. “That’s the power of our amnesia, of our forgetting, is that we struggled to build community today because we don’t know how we built it in the past.”

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

Historic image of cameramen recording Michi Tanioka, 5, as she waits to be sent from Los Angeles to the Manzanar prison camp in April 1942.Image credit: Library of Congress/Russell Lee

Exhibition puts viewers in midst of WWII-era removal of Japanese Americans

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‘BeHere / 1942,’ presented by the Yanai Initiative of UCLA and Tokyo’s Waseda University, opens May 7

Historic image of cameramen recording Michi Tanioka, 5, as she waits to be sent from Los Angeles to the Manzanar prison camp in April 1942.

Cameramen record Michi Tanioka, 5, as she waits to be sent from Los Angeles to the Manzanar prison camp in April 1942. This image, taken by photographer Russell Lee, and others by Lee and Dorothea Lange documenting forced removals along the West Coast were used as inspiration for Masaki Fujihata’s immersive AR re-creation. Image credit: Library of Congress/Russell Lee

By Alison Hewitt | May 2, 2022

Eighty years ago, during World War II, the U.S. government forcibly removed Japanese Americans from the West Coast, incarcerating 120,000 in concentration camps. This May, an exhibition at the Japanese American National Museum lets visitors step into those dark days of 1942 through an augmented reality re-creation at the very site where thousands of Japanese Americans living in downtown Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo neighborhood were ordered to report before trains and buses took them to the camps.

“BeHere / 1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration,” which opens May 7, is presented by the Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities, a joint project of UCLA and Japan’s Waseda University, in collaboration with the museum.

The brainchild of pioneering Japanese media artist and former UCLA visiting professor Masaki Fujihata, the exhibition draws on thousands of historic photographs of the 1942 removal, including many taken by government-employed photographers Dorothea Lange and Russell Lee.

While Fujihata incorporates scores of these images into his exhibition, he also reexamines and transforms them to shed new light on the dynamics of the expulsion tragedy. He reimagines some as AR videos and hyper-enlarges others to reveal for the first time the reflections in subjects’ eyes, allowing visitors to see what they saw: reporters and government officials hovering just outside the frame.

“This is an exhibit about what photographs reveal and what they conceal,” said UCLA Professor Michael Emmerich, director of the Yanai Initiative. “On one level, it is about what happened here in Little Tokyo and all along the West Coast in 1942, but it is also about the present. Even 80 years later, we are still grappling with anti-Asian violence and racism and still dealing as a society with the same civil rights issues.”

Opening during Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, “BeHere / 1942” launches almost 80 years to the day — May 9, 1942 — that 3,475 residents of Little Tokyo lost their homes, their possessions and their freedom. It was among the largest of the wartime Japanese American removals. About 37,000 Los Angeles residents of Japanese descent were incarcerated, including many who departed in April 1942 from the former Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple, now known as the Historic Bulding on the museum’s campus.


A behind-the-scenes look at the making of the AR re-creation in Los Angeles | By David Leonard

In the museum’s outdoor plaza, facing the historic temple building, visitors can use smartphones (with the “BeHere / 1942” app) or museum-provided devices to view Fujihata’s massive 200-person AR installation. By aiming their device at the building and nearby spaces, they’ll see a series of historically inspired 3D videos overlayed on the physical environment, recreating a scene like the one that occurred May 9 and up and down the West Coast. The installation will remain visible even after the exhibition concludes on Oct. 9.

Drawing inspiration from the photographs of Lange and Lee, the digital re-creation involved dozens of volunteer “actors” in both Los Angeles and Tokyo who donned period costumes — some even got 1940s-style haircuts — then entered special film studios to have their likenesses recorded through a new technique called volumetric video capture and integrated into the AR app. Three of these volunteers were among those sent to the camps in 1942, including Michi Tanioka, 85, who was expelled from Little Tokyo with her family as a 5-year-old.

Left: Image of Michi Tanioka, 85, participating in the augmented reality re-creation. Image credit: Masaki Fujihata. Right, Tanioka at age 5, waiting to be sent to a prison camp. Image credit: Library of Congress/Russell Lee.

Left: Michi Tanioka, 85, participating in the augmented reality re-creation. Image by Masaki Fujihata. Right, Tanioka at age 5, waiting to be sent to a prison camp. Image: Library of Congress/Russell Lee.

“It was a major part of my young life to be taken away at that age,” said Tanioka, who recalled spending many years ashamed of her imprisonment before becoming a docent at the museum. “My family was just starting to have a better lifestyle, but then all of that stopped. After 9/11, I saw the same thing could happen to others if we weren’t vigilant and outspoken. Hopefully this exhibit sends the message that nothing like this should ever happen again.”

Tanioka was also among those photographed during the removal. A picture of her clutching a doll while a Japanese woman, possibly an interpreter, kneels next to her and two white cameramen record her is featured on the exhibition’s catalog. Fujihata used this image for reference in one of his AR scenes. He reviewed dozens of photos to depict one such moment frozen in time, with the camera panning to reveal the intimidating scene Tanioka and other children encountered.

The exhibition also encourages visitors to put themselves in the photographers’ shoes by imagining they’ve been dispatched to document the removal. Inside the museum is a smaller AR installation, a re-creation of downtown Los Angeles’ Santa Fe train depot from which Japanese American residents were sent to the camp at Manzanar. The scene is viewable only through specialized replicas of the Graflex camera used by Lange, and the installation displays pictures visitors take.

“I tried to understand how these photographs were made — the relationship of the subject and the photographer — and to find ways to look at these pictures, not just as a consumer of the image but from the perspective of the person behind the camera,” said Fujihata, who conceived the exhibition while a Regents’ Professor at UCLA in 2019–20. “When a cameraman came and asked to take your photograph, you couldn’t say no, especially in a situation like the forced removal, over which you had no control. There was a clear hierarchy then, as there is now, with the camera becoming a sort of weapon.”

This dual perspective invites deeper engagement with the removal and incarceration, inspiring deep sympathy with those being incarcerated while at the same time forcing visitors to see through the eyes of the photographers — some of whose photos, like Lange’s, so deliberately invoked the injustice that they were censored by the government.

Using new technology to teach about the forced removal and incarceration is a vital way to communicate about the importance of civil rights, especially after the survivors are gone, said Ann Burroughs, president and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum.

“It has been 80 years since people of Japanese ancestry were forcibly removed from their homes in Little Tokyo, yet issues of racism, discrimination and exclusion remain starkly present,” she said. “The need to advocate for inclusion and social justice remains urgent. By combining our historic knowledge with new and innovative technology to tell these important stories, we honor this legacy and help to reimagine a just future.”

Read more about the Japanese American removal and incarceration on UCLA Newsroom:

► A lesson in state-sanctioned injustice

► Understanding today’s anti-Asian violence by looking at the past

► Documentary explores the site of the Manzanar camp

► Bruins imprisoned in camps return 70 years later to receive degrees

‘I know I have civil rights’: How the incarceration resonates today

Image of June Aoichi Berk with her with her family at the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas, where they were incarcerated.

June Aoichi Berk (far right) with her family at the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas, where they were incarcerated. Image courtesy of June Aochi Berk

June Aochi Berk, now 90 and a docent at the museum, vividly recalls preparing to go to the camps 80 years ago. Her parents and neighbors had a few days to sell most of their belongings, and, fearing arrest as they saw community leaders taken away, they built backyard bonfires to destroy family heirlooms suggesting connections to Japan.

“My older sister was very upset, and I remember she said, ‘I know I have civil rights. They can’t do this to us. We’re American citizens,’” said Berk, who participated in the AR re-creation. Though she used to avoid discussing her past, she now speaks about the incarceration to groups of students, many who have never heard of the camps or only know about them from a single paragraph in history books.

“When you start to blame people for where they come from, we get into very dangerous territory,” Berk said. “I’ve never been to Japan. There was nothing my family could have done to stop the war. American Muslims didn’t cause 9/11. American Russians didn’t invade Ukraine. We have to speak out, because when one person’s civil rights are taken away, everyone’s civil rights are diminished. This exhibit reminds us to be vigilant so nobody goes through this again.”

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

Image credit: UCLA

UCLA poised to become a world leader in hip-hop studies

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Building on decades of scholarship, the campus’s new Hip Hop Initiative will highlight the local and global impact of this Black art form
Collage image of the covers of books on hip-hop and Black culture by UCLA faculty members who will play an integral role in the new Hip Hop Initiative.

A sampling of books on hip-hop and Black culture by UCLA faculty members who will play an integral role in the new Hip Hop Initiative. Image credit: UCLA

By Jessica Wolf

UCLA’s Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies today launched its wide-ranging Hip Hop Initiative, which will establish UCLA as a leading center for hip-hop studies globally by way of artist residencies, community engagement programs, a book series, an oral history and digital archive project, postdoctoral fellowships and more.

Chuck D, the longtime leader of the politically and socially conscious rap group Public Enemy, is the program’s first artist-in-residence.

The initiative focuses on hip-hop as one of modern history’s most powerful cultural movements and most visible symbols of contemporary Black performance and protest.

“As we celebrate 50 years of hip-hop music and cultural history, the rigorous study of the culture offers us a wealth of intellectual insight into the massive social and political impact of Black music, Black history and Black people on global culture — from language, dance, visual art and fashion to electoral politics, political activism and more,” said anthropology professor H. Samy Alim, who is spearheading the initiative.

Co-leading the initiative with Alim are Bunche Center assistant director Tabia Shawel and Samuel Lamontagne, a doctoral candidate in the department of ethnomusicology.

The initiative is something Alim and his colleagues have been working toward for decades. It builds on the wealth of hip-hop scholarship produced at UCLA and across institutes of higher education since the 1990s and comes at a “convergence moment” when hip-hop music and culture have become dominant in the public sphere, as evidenced by the recent Super Bowl halftime show and the addition of break dancing to the 2024 Olympic Games.

“We’re also in a historical moment of hip-hop culture entering its ‘museum phase,’” said dream hampton, a writer and filmmaker who serves on the group’s advisory board.

Indeed, the Smithsonian Institution recently released a comprehensive hip-hop anthology, and museums like the Universal Hip Hop Museum in the Bronx and the South African Hip Hop Museum in Johannesburg are solely dedicated to the music and culture.

Shining a light on the West Coast and Los Angeles

With the launch of the initiative, UCLA becomes the first major West Coast destination for scholarly explorations of hip-hop culture, which allows for a deeper focus on hip-hop’s local development and impact, said Lamontagne, whose dissertation reexamines Los Angeles hip-hop history.

“Our goal,” he said, “is also to advance the legacy of UCLA by producing original, creative, public-facing, social justice–oriented work and building bridges between academia and the community by discussing the implications of scholarly research and how it can serve Black and brown communities in Los Angeles.”

The concentration of world-renowned scholars of hip-hop at UCLA makes the campus uniquely suited to lead hip-hop studies, both locally and globally, into the future, Shawel noted.

“At this moment, the UCLA Bunche Center has a critical mass of highly regarded, innovative faculty who, in some instances, have been writing about hip-hop culture for over four decades, exploring its musical, social and political impact around the world, from South Central to South Africa,” she said.

The Hip Hop Initiative’s advisory board includes some of the nation’s leading hip-hop artists and thinkers, like hampton, Chuck D, Joan Morgan, Davey D and UCLA alumni Jeff Chang and Ben Caldwell, who will serve alongside UCLA professors Cheryl Keyes, Bryonn Bain, Adam Bradley, Scot Brown, Gaye Theresa Johnson, Robin Kelley, Kyle Mays and Shana Redmond.

Image of Hip-hop legends Chuck D, Rakim and Talib Kweli, curator and journalist Tyree Boyd-Pates, and UCLA’s H. Samy Alim at an event at the California African American Museum co-sponsored by the Hip Hop Studies Working Group at UCLA.

Left to right: Hip-hop legends Chuck D, Rakim and Talib Kweli, curator and journalist Tyree Boyd-Pates, and UCLA’s H. Samy Alim at an event at the California African American Museum co-sponsored by the Hip Hop Studies Working Group at UCLA. (March 11, 2020) Image credit: HRDWRKER/Courtesy of California African American Museum

Hip-hop studies: Growing from UCLA roots

One of the pioneering academics in the field, Keyes is a professor at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music and chair of the department of African American studies. Nearly two decades ago, a group of graduate students set up an informal hip-hop research group with Keyes as their guide. In 2005, Alim organized their efforts into the formal Hip Hop Studies Working Group at UCLA, which has become a space for graduate students, postdoctoral scholars and advanced undergraduates to explore methodological and theoretical issues in the study of hip-hop culture.

“It’s been incredible to witness and mentor so many students as they reach into the histories and experiences of the communities that gave rise to hip-hop,” Keyes said. “There’s a richness and depth and context that are yet to be discovered and revealed, and this initiative will support much more of that.”

Students have also benefited from the working group’s ongoing speaker and event series, which has recently featured hip-hop icons Rakim, Chuck D and Talib Kweli at the California African American Museum and a film screening and discussion with rapper and filmmaker Boots Riley at the Fowler Museum at UCLA.

In addition to supporting the efforts of the Hip Hop Studies Working Group, the Hip Hop Initiative will include a wide variety of programs, including:

  • Artists-in-residence
    UCLA will host hip-hop artists whose work foregrounds issues of community engagement and social justice. Chuck D, who begins his UCLA residency this week, will participate in a series of on-campus events that bring together artists and members of the community.
  • Global community engagement
    Community-based projects include the Hip Hop High School–to–Higher Education Pipeline, the Hip Hop Disability Justice Project (with the Krip-Hop movement) and a long-standing project exploring hip-hop as culturally sustaining pedagogy in Spain and South Africa.
  • Book series and publications
    The initiative will expand the University of California Press Hip Hop Studies Series, which is edited by Alim and Chang along with leading hip-hop intellectuals Tricia Rose, Mark Anthony Neal, Marc Lamont Hill and others. The second book from this series, “Rebel Speak: A Justice Movement Mixtape” by Bryonn Bain, hits bookstores this spring. The initiative will also support the work of emerging scholars through manuscript-development workshops.
  • Postdoctoral fellowships
    The initiative will support a research position intended for hip-hop studies scholars whose work seeks to improve the conditions of Black life. Scholars will be housed in the Bunche Center.
  • Hip-hop lecture series
    Public-facing lectures will feature cutting-edge hip-hop scholarship presented by international scholars.
  • Oral history and digital archive
    UCLA is the first institution on the West Coast to develop an archive dedicated to the study of hip-hop in Los Angeles, which has long been a major hub for hip-hop cultural production and the hip-hop industry. Faculty and staff involved in the initiative have begun a community-based oral history and digital archive focused on preserving the history of West Coast hip-hop.

Read more on UCLA Newsroom and UCLA Magazine about hip-hop studies at UCLA:

► Teaching rap lyrics as literature

► Cheryl Keyes hits the right notes with Smithsonian anthology

► Are major labels passing up profits by playing to racial stereotypes?

► Bryonn Bain: ‘Lyrics from lockdown’

► Beat scholars

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu.

Image of actor Vin Diesel with director Justin Lin on the set of “F9: The Fast Saga.”Courtesy of Universal Studios

People of color helped keep movie business afloat during pandemic

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UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report emphasizes importance of minority audiences

Image of actor Vin Diesel with director Justin Lin on the set of “F9: The Fast Saga.”

Actor Vin Diesel, left, with director Justin Lin on the set of “F9: The Fast Saga.” The movie, which featured a cast that was more than 50% minority, was the year’s third highest-grossing film at the box office. Image Courtesy of Universal Studios

By Jessica Wolf |

A large percentage of the movie business’s box office revenue and home viewership was driven by consumers of color in 2021, according to UCLA’s latest Hollywood Diversity Report. The report examines the 252 top-performing English-language films — based on box office receipts and streaming data — during the second year that the COVID-19 pandemic forced movie studios to adopt unconventional release strategies.

The report tracks progress for women and minorities in acting, directing and writing roles, and analyzes audience segments by race and ethnicity, focusing on Asian American, Black, Latino and white audiences, and age, focusing on viewers 18 to 49.

Published twice a year — with one analysis of movies and another for TV — the Hollywood Diversity Report has consistently shown increases in the percentages of women and people of color in key jobs in front of the camera. Researchers have also tracked sustained, albeit stubborn, growth for women and minorities in Hollywood writing and directing jobs.

Chart showing that The largest single category of films considered in this report includes those that were released solely on streaming platforms12 (45.6 percent), which is down from the share of streaming-only films considered in the previous report for 2020 (54.6 percent). By contrast, only 17.9 percent of films were released solely in theaters in 2021.13 Meanwhile, 20.2 percent of films were released both on streaming platforms and in limited theaters,14 while 13.1 percent were released both on streaming platforms and widely in theaters.15 Finally, only 1.6 percent of films were released both theatrically and through transactional video on demand,16 and 1.6 percent were released on streaming after a modified theatrical release window (45+ days).17

The report’s authors noted that 2021 was the first year since they began tracking such statistics that the majority of Academy Awards went to films that were directed by people of color and featured minority actors in lead roles. And the year’s third highest-grossing film at the box office was “F9: The Fast Saga,” which featured a cast that was more than 50% minority and was directed by Taiwanese American filmmaker Justin Lin. Sixty-five percent of opening weekend ticket sales for “F9” were to minority audiences, the highest figure among all films in the top 10.

The report tracks the numbers of writers, directors and actors who identify as Asian American, Black, Latino, Middle Eastern/North African, multiracial and Native American. People in those groups make up 42.7% of the U.S. population, and they form an important consumer bloc for entertainment, including movies.

For six of the 10 top-grossing films that opened in theaters in 2021, people of color accounted for the majority of opening-weekend U.S. ticket sales.

The report also analyzed box office performance based on the diversity of the movies’ casts — whether minority actors made up less than 11% of the cast, 11% to 20%, and so on, up to 51% or more. The study revealed that films with 21% to 30% minority actors had higher median global box office receipts than films in any other tier. That echoed a pattern since the report began tracking box office performance in 2011.

The report also found that, as in previous years, films with the least diverse casts (11% or less minority) were the poorest performers at the box office.

Chart showing that Median global box office peaked for films with casts that were from 21 to 30 percent minority in 2021 ($107.4 million). Twenty-five films fell into this cast diversity interval, including Venom: Let There Be Carnage ($501.0 million), A Quiet Place Part II ($297.4 million), and Cruella ($233.3 million). In a year in which theater attendance began to rebound after a COVID-decimated 2020, theatrically released films with relatively diverse casts again outshined their less-diverse counterparts at the box office. Indeed, the 14 films with the least-diverse casts (less than 11 percent minority) were again the poorest performers in 2021. “Last year, every time a big movie exceeded expectations or broke a box office record, the majority of opening weekend audiences were people of color,” said Ana-Christina Ramón, a co-author of the report and the director of research and civic engagement for the UCLA College division of social sciences. “For people of color, and especially Latino families, theaters provided an excursion when almost everything else was shut down. In a sense, people of color kept studios afloat the past couple of years.

“Studios should consider them to be investors, and as investors, they should get a return in the form of representation.”

Overall, 43.1% of actors in the movies analyzed by the report were minorities. That’s more than double the percentage from 2011, the first year of data collected by the authors, when 20.7% of actors were minorities. And 31.0% of the top-performing films in 2021 had casts in which the majority of the actors were minorities.

“Minorities reached proportionate representation in 2020 for the first time when it comes to overall cast diversity in films, and that held true again in 2021,” said Darnell Hunt, dean of the social sciences at UCLA and co-author of the report.

Hunt said the phenomenon is probably due in part to the greater number of movies that are initially released on streaming services: Of the films analyzed in the report, 45.6% were released on streaming services only.

Chart showing that During the second full year of the pandemic, the volume of major films released via streaming platforms continued to increase, from 87 films in 2020 to 164 in 2021. Again, for all groups, median ratings were highest for relatively diverse streaming films in 2021. That is, for viewers 18-49 (3.08 ratings points) and Black households (12.49 ratings points), ratings peaked for streaming films with majority-minority casts. Seventy-two films fell into this cast diversity interval in 2021, including: Raya and the Last Dragon, Coming 2 America, Vivo, and Mortal Kombat. For viewers 18-49, though, it should be noted that streaming films with casts that were from 21 percent to 30 percent minority came in a close second (2.94 ratings points). For White (5.10 ratings points), Latinx (7.34 ratings points), Asian (5.90 ratings points), and other-race households (5.48 ratings points), streaming films that were from 21 percent to 30 percent minority also enjoyed the highest ratings in 2021. Examples of the 36 films that fell into this diversity interval include: Don’t Look Up, The Boss Baby: Family Business, and The Suicide Squad.

“We do think this dual-release strategy is here to stay,” Hunt said. “And it could have a lasting impact on diversity metrics in front of and behind the camera as studios think about how to finance content for different platforms.”

For example, the report found that women and people of color were far more likely than white men to direct films with budgets less than $20 million.

“A small production budget usually means that there is also little to no marketing and studio support, unless it’s from a production company known for making art house films,” Ramón said. “And that makes it more difficult for filmmakers to get the next opportunity if their films have to fight for attention.”

Hunt said studios are likely to bank on big-budget tentpole movies and sequels as traditional box office drivers, even as they continue to experiment with release platforms and adjust the amount of time between films’ theatrical releases and their arrival on streaming services or on DVD or Blu-ray.

Among the 2021 films released to streaming services, those with casts in which a majority of actors were non-white enjoyed the highest ratings among viewers aged 18 to 49 and in Black households. Seventy-two films with majority-minority casts were released on streaming in 2021, including “Raya and the Last Dragon,” “Coming 2 America,” “Vivo” and “Mortal Kombat.”

Chart showing that Among the White,24 Black, Latinx, multiracial, and MENA directors helming 2021 films, women lagged far behind men. Only among Asian and Native directors did women approach or reach parity with their male counterparts in securing these important positions.

“In 2021, diversity in front of the camera did not equate to more opportunities behind the camera for filmmakers who are women and people of color,” Ramón said. “They continue to receive less financing, even when they make films with white lead actors. Most of these filmmakers are relegated to low-budget films. For women of color, directing and writing opportunities are really the final frontier.”

Of the filmmakers who directed the movies analyzed in the report, 21.8% were women and 30.2% were people of color. Among the screenwriters for those films, 33.5% were women and 32.3% were people of color. Diversity in both jobs increased incrementally from 2020.

Out of the 76 minority directors of 2021’s top films, just 23 were women. And among Black, Latino and multiracial directors, at least twice as many were men as women in each racial or ethnic classification.

Although there was gender parity among Asian American and Native American directors, the overall numbers of directors from those groups were very small: just 17 Asian American directors and and just two Native American directors were represented in 2021. Among white directors, 32 were women and 143 were men.

The authors counted one trans woman among the directors of the 2021 films they analyzed.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

UCLA, Howard University launch summer program on race, ethnicity and politics

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The new UC-funded Mark Q. Sawyer Summer Institute will support young scholars in this burgeoning academic field
Image of Mark Sawyer

The program’s namesake, the late Mark Sawyer, was a professor of political science and African American studies at UCLA and a pioneer in the field of race, ethnicity and politics.

By Jessica Wolf 

The first-ever Mark Q. Sawyer Summer Institute will bring four undergraduate fellows from Howard University in Washington, D.C., to the UCLA campus this June for an immersive six-week academic research program that explores the crucial role of race, ethnicity and politics in society.

The multiyear program, a collaboration between faculty from UCLA’s political science department and Howard, is funded by the UC–HBCU Initiative, which seeks to boost the number of undergraduate scholars from historically Black colleges and universities who enroll in and complete advanced degree programs at University of California campuses.

Named for the late UCLA professor Mark Sawyer, a pioneer in the field of race, ethnicity and politics, the newly launched summer institute will be led by UCLA’s Lorrie Frasure, an associate professor of political science and African American studies, and Natalie Masuoka, an associate professor of political science and chair of the Asian American studies department. Their Howard counterpart is Niambi Carter, an associate professor of political science and director of graduate studies.

“Our objective is to create an inclusive and supportive environment for students to develop their skills in research methods and design and to encourage participants to see themselves as confident and qualified applicants to an advanced degree program in political science,” said Frasure, who also serves as vice chair of graduate studies in political science.

Fellows in the program will focus on race and ethnicity as a central category that informs political processes in the United States and will help produce research that spotlights the underrecognized political role played by African American and other communities of color. The scholars will familiarize themselves with empirical research methods through innovative workshops and participate in seminars that explore theories of U.S. racial and ethnic politics, specifically Black politics.

The four undergraduate scholars selected for this summer, all of them political science majors entering their senior year at Howard, are Justina Blanco, Havillyn Felder, Donroy Ferdinand and Yasmine Grier.

Carter said the partnership between UCLA’s political science department and Howard’s program in Black politics provides an ideal opportunity for some of Howard’s best and brightest students to work on cutting-edge research while carving a pathway to graduate studies and professorships.

“I am excited that our students get to experience a different campus and different approaches to political science. I am also expecting UCLA to learn a lot from our students, whose worldview has been shaped in really important ways by Howard University and our motto, ‘Truth and Service,’” Carter said. “This partnership helps both our campuses achieve our shared goals of producing bright scholars who will bring all of who they are to the classroom and in their approaches to studying some of the biggest issues in political science. We look forward to creating lasting, deep connections and looking for other places to connect our campuses.”

As part of the mission of the UC–HBCU Initiative, the University of California will waive application fees for alumni of the initiative’s programs — including the Sawyer Summer Institute — who apply to any of the more than 700 academic graduate programs at the UC’s 10 campuses. Those admitted to advanced degree programs will be eligible to receive competitive funding packages.

The field of race and ethnicity politics at UCLA today serves as a model for universities across the nation, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Mark Sawyer, Frasure said.

Sawyer, a professor of political science and African American studies who died in 2017, co-founded the race, ethnicity and politics program in UCLA’s political science department in 2006 and was instrumental in establishing the campus’s department of African American studies in 2015.

“Professor Sawyer is remembered as an outstanding scholar and a committed mentor and teacher,” Frasure said, “but he is most remembered as a visionary builder of lasting institutions.”

UCLA’s political science graduate program is currently one of only a handful in the U.S. to have established racial and ethnic politics as an institutionalized field of study, and its political science department boasts one of the largest concentrations of faculty engaged in the specialty.

► See UCLA’s recent study of how attitudes toward politics and policy vary among racial groups.

The Sawyer Summer Institute will also benefit from programmatic partnerships with UCLA’s department of African American studies, Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies and Academic Advancement Program.

“We’ve assembled an incredible team of scholars and programs for this first year of the initiative,” Masuoka said. “We are eager to welcome these young researchers to UCLA but also look forward to learning from them. We have an opportunity to consider how their experiences and ideas can inform novel and innovative research questions.”

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu.

Image credit: Rythum Vinoben

A legacy of confronting injustice

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UCLA Professor Terence Keel’s groundbreaking interdisciplinary work uncovers deadly hidden bias

Image of Dr. Terence Keel

Terence Keel delivering keynote lecture at Brown University Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice. Image credit: Rythum Vinoben

By Jonathan Riggs

As a freshman at Xavier University of Louisiana, Terence Keel carried a lot of weight on his shoulders. He dreamed of studying medicine to honor the hard work of his ancestors—sharecroppers, autoworkers and Black servicemen—and the loving diligence of his parents, who championed education and made sure he participated in STEM enrichment programs.

“Everything changed when my mother died from a very aggressive form of cancer. Because she was Black and didn’t have a lot of resources, she went undiagnosed when it should have been caught earlier,” Keel says. “Her passing shifted for me what I thought about science, medicine and their limits. I started to ask larger questions about the meaning and purpose of death, life, dignity and accountability.”

Those questions inspired Keel to switch his major to religion, and to go on to earn a master’s at Harvard Divinity School and then a doctorate in religion and the history of science at Harvard. Today, Keel holds a split appointment in the Department of African American Studies (in UCLA Social Sciences) and the Institute for Society and Genetics (in UCLA Life Sciences). In addition, he is the Founding Director of the BioCritical Studies Lab, the Associate Director in the Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, and the Advisor for Structural Competency and Innovation at the UCLA Simulation Center inside the David Geffen School of Medicine.

In 2018, Keel’s first award-winning book, Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science, discussed how pervasive Western religious ideas have shaped the approach of scientists and their work.

“For so much of human history, we have wanted to believe that God or nature determines the destiny of living things, so we have downplayed the significance of human activity in charting the course of history,” he says. “One clear example is the sustained unwillingness, until recently, to acknowledge that industrialization has fundamentally changed the climate of the Earth. I’m really interested in how our cultural commitments get in the way of good science and hard questions.”

His current work takes this sensibility and examines the life chances of Black and brown people, whose very health has been affected by structural racism’s influence on everything from access to medical care to prevailing beliefs about biology. Spurred on by the murder of George Floyd and the controversial subsequent medical investigations, Keel launched The Coroner Reports Project.

The project is a collaboration with Nick Shapiro, assistant professor, UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics; Helen Jones of the social justice organization Dignity and Power Now; and Lauren Brown, assistant professor, San Diego State University School of Public Health. It examines crowd-based sources to estimate the number of people who have died in law enforcement custody of causes not related to firearms over the past 20 years—including 350 people they’ve identified in Los Angeles alone.

“These are instances where a medical examiner or coroner has the most power in determining cause of death, but they’re also vulnerable to blaming the biology of the victims and not the actions of law enforcement,” says Keel. “We’ve also looked at a number of individuals who have died inside of the jail system in Los Angeles, which don’t get much media attention due to highly public beliefs around the incarcerated. And we are beginning to publish research that shows that there is a real crisis in how we investigate the deaths of the incarcerated and those taken into police custody.”

The work of witnessing these injustices and then carefully untangling the complicated factors that contributed to them is heart-wrenching, and Keel struggles sometimes to have these difficult conversations with his three sons, who range from elementary to high school to college age.

“Each new instance is yet another example in a long series of dinner conversations about what it is to be a Black man in this country and how to balance the anger and frustration and despair with hope and optimism,” Keel says.

When he feels that weight grow too heavy, he finds release in traveling—especially through Mexico, which offered a haven to many Black Americans who left the U.S during the 1920s and 1930s. But most of all, he draws strength from his activist heroes, like Frederick Douglass, and 20th-century figures such as the anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells and the African American sculptor and graphic artist Elizabeth Catlett.

“These fights are very old; Douglass, Wells, Catlett and many other people before me have tried to confront racial terrorism and structural violence. I think we all have an opportunity to respond better to the issues facing our community,” he says. “I see myself carrying on the legacy of never losing sight of the social conditions that bear on Black life.”

For more of Our Stories at the UCLA College, click here.

Image of Samantha Mensah, UCLA doctoral candidate in chemistryReed Hutchinson/UCLA

She’s a catalyst: UCLA doctoral candidate Samantha Mensah, co-founder of BlackInChem

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Image of Samantha Mensah, UCLA doctoral candidate in chemistry

Samantha Mensah, UCLA doctoral candidate in chemistry. Photo by Reed Hutchinson/UCLA

Samantha Mensah co-founded BlackInChem to help other students of color and women advance as chemists

By Nancy Gondo

Sparked by the national reckoning with racial justice, UCLA graduate student Samantha Mensah has spent the last two years rigorously pursuing her doctorate in chemistry while also trying to make chemistry and other science fields more welcoming to fellow Black scientists and underrepresented people.

In the midst of an isolating pandemic, Mensah has put in countless hours mobilizing Black scientists and their allies via emails and Zoom meetings to build a support system for thousands of Black chemists across the United States, Canada, Africa and Europe — and helped secure about $130,000 in funding for postdoctoral fellowships.

Such is the determination of someone who has recently dedicated herself to trying to help build a fuller and more easily accessible pipeline into the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and math. One of the most important ways to accomplish that, Mensah said, is to have more mentors with similar experiences to help guide students — and especially to help students of color and women students thrive.

That’s why in 2020, she co-founded BlackInChem, a nonprofit that helps Black chemists network with and support each other and aims to boost diversity in the sciences.

“I want to continue to be a mentor to Black people in chemistry, which is something I’m doing with my nonprofit,” said Mensah, who is working toward her doctorate in materials chemistry in the division of physical sciences in the UCLA College. “If you can’t see people who look like you doing science, then it’s harder for you to imagine yourself doing it as well — without the idea that you’re an imposter or you don’t deserve to be where you are.”

As someone committed to helping others succeed, Mensah credits her first chemistry professor for inspiring the young girl who grew up loving robotics to pursue a career as a scientist.

Karin Chumbimuni-Torres, an associate professor at the University of Central Florida, where Mensah did her undergraduate studies, proved firsthand how a woman and person of color could thrive in a field historically dominated by white men.

“She showed me what opportunities there are in chemistry,” said Mensah, who worked in Chumbimuni-Torres’ lab throughout college. “She helped me realize that I can do research as an undergraduate, present at conferences and if I work hard in a lab, that I can publish papers. She influenced the trajectory of my career in a major way.”

Now Mensah hopes to help other women and people of color recognize science as a viable career option.

“There’s a lot of us who are aching to contribute in the field, but it’s hard to because of the representation issue,” she said, referring to the lack of women and people of color in science labs. “And it really affects the future of the sciences.”

Image of the BlackInChem logo

BlackInChem logo. Image courtesy of BlackInChem

BlackInChem is part of the BlackInX network, which is made up of more than 80 groups representing STEM fields such as physics, neuroscience and science policy. BlackInX launched in 2020, after George Floyd’s death and the Black Birder incident in New York, when a white woman accused a Black bird watcher of threatening her. These incidents once again exposed the embedded racial inequalities in the United States.

“The response has been amazing,” Mensah said. “People are supporting us, not only financially but also showing up at our events and amplifying our work and the work of Black scientists.”

In February, BlackInChem and the UCLA division of physical sciences announced a travel grant members can apply for to attend the American Chemical Society Spring Conference, which takes place this month in San Diego.

And in August, BlackInChem teamed up with the Emerald Foundation, Inc., a private biomedical research organization, to offer a postdoctoral fellowship. The award is intended to help more Black researchers make the transition to tenure-track positions at top institutions.

“We realized that we don’t have a network and online community of scientists,” Mensah said. “I feel like it only helps the oppressor when those who are oppressed aren’t speaking to each other, creating fellowship, and talking to each other about their experiences.”

The sky’s not the limit

After graduating from the University of Central Florida in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and a minor in nanoscience, Mensah set her sights even higher. She applied to — and was accepted into — UCLA’s graduate program in chemistry. She received a master’s degree in materials chemistry in 2019 from UCLA.

“The illustriousness of the Ph.D. program attracted me to UCLA,” said Mensah, who studies biosensors that can detect neurotransmitters in vivo. “We have scholars who have accomplished amazing things. My department is not only advancing science and chemistry but advancing professional development of their people.”

And Mensah is doing her part to help a more diverse group of students tap the program’s strengths — at UCLA and beyond.

“Samantha is a visionary leader whose dedication is an example for anyone in the sciences, no matter the discipline,” said Miguel García-Garibay, dean of the division of physical sciences in the UCLA College. “Her commitment to increasing access and equity in the sciences has guided all of us to do better, from our home department of chemistry and biochemistry throughout the division of physical sciences and beyond.”

Mensah said she also appreciates her advisors, Anne Andrews, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and Paul Weiss, distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry.

“They have been so supportive of all of my efforts and are training me to be a better scientist,” Mensah said.

At UCLA, Mensah also found inspiration in another woman — the late physicist and astronaut, Sally Ride. Ride, who took physics courses at UCLA, made history in 1983 by becoming the first American woman in space.

“I always knew about her but didn’t realize she was affiliated with UCLA,” Mensah said. “And then when I got here, I always passed her photo. There’s a Sally Ride exhibition in Young Hall with pictures and documents that I’d walk by every morning.”

That’s helped Mensah see the sky isn’t the limit — literally.

“She was not only a scientist, but an LGBT astronaut,” she said about Ride. “I am still holding onto the dream of becoming an astronaut. I love her tenacity.”

UCLA boasts others like Ride, who show what can be done with education. Anna Lee Fisher, a triple Bruin who earned a bachelor’s and master’s in chemistry from UCLA, as well as a medical degree from the UCLA School of Medicine, journeyed to space in 1984.

Becoming the mentor

Mensah’s path to UCLA wasn’t easy. Due to economic hardships, her family moved often, between the Dominican Republic, New York City and South Florida. Science didn’t make it on her radar until middle school, when she discovered afterschool programs ranging from journalism to theater to chemistry.

At first, she took classes after the bell rang to stall returning to her foster home. But she soon saw a whole new world of possibilities. Mensah especially loved the robotics club, where she learned how to code robots to perform tasks.

“It was my first introduction to STEM in general,” she says. “The sciences were what I was really excelling at. And once I realized I could manipulate matter on an atomic level, it was just onward from there.”

She’s never looked back. Instead, she hopes to serve as a visible inspiration to other Black women and girls who want to become scientists. Mensah channels Ride as she points out how important it is for girls to see role models in their careers so they can visualize themselves in those jobs. “You can’t be what you can’t see,” Mensah said, quoting Ride.

So, what’s next for the aspiring astronaut? After completing her doctorate, Mensah hopes to launch medical technology companies to help tackle medical issues such as heart disease, a leading cause of death in the Black community.

She’d also like to run for public office one day, so she can help advocate for STEM education and science funding.

“I remember thinking for years we need more diversity among scientists in government,” Mensah said. “And then later on, I realized that I could be the one striving toward representation.”

Related Links

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu.

Brookhaven National Laboratory/DOE

UCLA, partners win Department of Energy grant to boost diversity in field of nuclear physics

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Image of the DOE’s new Electron-Ion Collider in New York

Trainees will have the unique opportunity to conduct research related to the DOE’s new Electron-Ion Collider in New York (pictured), where scientists hope to determine the structure of quarks and gluons, the building blocks of matter. Image credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory/DOE

By Stuart Wolpert

The UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy has received federal government funding for a pilot program designed to help low-income, first-generation and historically underrepresented undergraduate students from across California pursue graduate degrees and careers in nuclear physics, with the aim of increasing the diversity of scientists in this field.

The $500,000 grant from the nuclear physics program in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science will support training, mentorship and hands-on research experiences for students, including internships at national laboratories and the opportunity to work on research related to the DOE’s cutting-edge Electron-Ion Collider, said associate professor of physics Zhongbo Kang, who is heading the program at UCLA.

The grant-funded program is a collaboration among UCLA, UC Riverside, the Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories, Cal Poly Pomona and the Cal-Bridge program, a statewide network of nine UC, 23 CSU and more than 110 community college campuses that seeks to create greater opportunities for underrepresented minorities in STEM fields. The undergraduate trainees are selected through Cal-Bridge.

Associate professor of physics Zhongbo Kang, who is heading the grant-funded program at UCLA and coordinating trainees’ work on the Electron-Ion Collider. Image Courtesy of Zhongbo Kang

“The UC and CSU systems are among the largest engines for social mobility in the United States and play a key role in providing opportunities to students from disadvantaged backgrounds,” said Kang, who is a member of both the Mani L. Bhaumik Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Center for Quantum Science and Engineering at UCLA. “Their student bodies contain the largest pool of low-income, first-generation and underrepresented minority students in the nation, and we are in an excellent position to tap into this pool and broaden the nuclear physics pipeline.”

During each year of the two-year program, four trainees will join research groups at UCLA or UC Riverside and will intern for 10 weeks during the summer at either Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory or Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. At UCLA, the nuclear physics group conducts theoretical research under Kang’s leadership and experimental research under professor of physics Huan Huang. Trainees will be integrated into one of these groups based on their research interests and will work with the professors and a team of undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral scholars and staff scientists.

DOE’s Electron-Ion Collider: The future of nuclear physics

The chance to conduct research related to the nascent Electron-Ion Collider, or EIC — the DOE’s flagship research project for the future of nuclear physics — is a one-of-a-kind opportunity for the trainees, Kang said, and he hopes the experience will help them see themselves as members of the EIC community. The massive facility, to be built on Long Island, New York, will use electron collisions with protons and atomic nuclei to produce images of quarks and gluons — the elementary building blocks of matter. In California, scientists will be working on the physics undergirding the collider and developing the facility’s detectors. The next few years will be a critical period for the design of the detectors.

“Given that the EIC experiments will likely start in about 10 years and run until mid-century, the students will see that they could become deeply ingrained with the project,” said Kang, who will coordinate the EIC research training programs with the California EIC consortium. “Our goal is to establish a Ph.D. bridge to the EIC program by training a cohort of students from diverse backgrounds that will be in an excellent potion to apply to graduate school. The EIC project provides an excellent platform for training the next generation of scientists.”

The undergraduate trainees will present their research results at conferences and participate in the meetings and workshops of the American Physical Society’s Division of Nuclear Physics and the California EIC consortium. They will learn to work effectively on large research projects, communicate results to other scientists and general audiences, learn software skills to run large-scale physics simulations and develop technical expertise in data science and machine learning.

The first trainees began the program this month. The $500,000 grant is part a larger, $3 million DOE effort to broaden and diversify nuclear and particle physics through research traineeships for undergraduates.

“The ability to fulfill our mission to discover, explore and understand all forms of nuclear matter relies on the availability of a highly trained, diverse community of investigators, researchers, students and staff,” said Timothy Hallman, the DOE’s associate director of science for nuclear physics. “The goal of this program is to help broaden and diversity this community to ensure that it is drawn from the broadest possible pool of potential nuclear and particle physicists within the U.S.”

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu.