Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made some suggestions during his oral arguments on Dec 9th that some top universities, such as the University of Texas, were too taxing for black students and that they might do better if they attended “a less-advanced school, … a slower-track school.” Scalia actually said “Most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas. They come from lesser schools.”

However many black scientists have responded to these comments which obviously left a lot of people shaking their heads. Here are some of the comments paraphrased from an article published in the L.A. Times (http://lat.ms/21XmHF0).

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein went to Harvard for her freshman year.

She eventually, at the University of Waterloo in Canada, wrote her doctoral dissertation “Cosmic Acceleration as Quantum Gravity Phenomenology,” but says it was not common for classmates to say “You only got in because you’re black,” and suggest that if not for affirmative action, she’d never be a student on a campus like this. She is now a research fellow studying theoretical cosmology at MIT.

Elizabeth Wayne, a University of Pennsylvania graduate who has a doctorate in biomedical engineering from Cornell University, recalled that if her white classmates performed poorly, professors might offer them tutoring or coveted research opportunities to help get them up to speed. “They would give them the benefit of the doubt,” she said.

She felt she did not have that luxury.

“I had to be at the top of my class, or people would think I didn’t belong there.”

Wayne also said in one of her podcasts “What if the admissions officer at University of Pennsylvania had said, ‘She’s black; there’s no way she’ll do well in a physics program at a prestigious university’?” she said. “What if they thought they were doing me a favor by not accepting me?”

And of course we all know about Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York and host of last year’s documentary series “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey,”. Talking on the alienation he felt as a black child who showed an interest in astrophysics.

“Teachers would say, ‘Don’t you want to be an athlete?’”

Basically being black in a top school is often tough because you are black and people assume you shouldn’t be there.

Read more of these comments here: http://lat.ms/21XmHF0