By: Laura Castillo-Page

We are pleased to share the third Office of Diversity and Inclusion (ODI) Annual Report. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (the National Academies) established the ODI in 2021, and the ODI released its first Annual Report in 2022. This year’s Annual Report documents continued institutional efforts to build momentum in the ODI’s implementation phase—which began with the launch of its inaugural, comprehensive 5-year DEI Action Plan in 2023—to further advance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at the National Academies.

In the midst of shifting social and political contexts around DEI, our commitment to upholding the values of DEI in National Academies’ programs, policies, and products remains steadfast. As an organization, we have reaffirmed our commitment to DEI, antiracism, and accessibility by publishing an updated, more robust DEI statement and new guiding principles to consider in all of our work at the National Academies. Putting our commitment into practice, we have prioritized four domains of our DEI

Action Plan:

1. Measuring progress on our DEI goals and objectives

2. Strengthening staff development and capacity

3. Increasing diversity in programmatic activities

4. Promoting communications and transparency

To advance our work in these four areas, the ODI has fostered internal and external partnerships as well as drawn from evidence-based strategies and best practices in the science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) fields.

This Annual Report highlights the milestones, projects, and activities achieved in partnership with our colleagues and partners in 2023–2024 and outlines goals for the upcoming year. With the implementation of our DEI Action Plan in full swing, our efforts focus on building momentum, taking advantage of timely opportunities, and adapting to the changing needs of the institution by creating new tools and enhanced capacity. In partnership with the National Academies’ units and divisions, the ODI has made significant progress toward its DEI goals and applied lessons learned to better position the organization to fulfill its mission of providing objective analysis and advising the nation on complex issues facing society and the world. We look forward to continuing our journey of learning and improvement, shared responsibility, and collective impact toward a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive National Academies.

The National Academies Press 2024

by Kilolo Kijakazi, K. Steven Brown, Donnie Charleston ,Kilolo Kijakazi ,Charmaine Runes

For most of its history, the United States excluded people of color from its main pathways of opportunity and upward mobility. This history of discriminatory policies and institutional practices created deep inequities across social and economic domains. But we envision a more equitable future in which the policies, programs, and institutional practices that produced inequitable outcomes are corrected and the effects are reversed. Achieving that vision would mean closing four yawning equity gaps between people of color and white people in the United States:  Closing the racial wealth gap would enable all people to invest in their own and their children’s futures, buy a home, obtain a quality education, and save for a secure retirement.  Eliminating racial inequities in public school quality would give all children the solid educational foundation they need to succeed in the 21st-century economy.  Closing employment and earnings gaps would provide all people with the dignity and security of a quality job, the opportunity to contribute to the nation’s prosperity, and the resources to support their and their children’s well-being and future prospects.  Ending punitive policing would make people and communities safer and increase confidence in the justice system. These gaps are wide and deeply entrenched. Racist policies and practices have been part of the nation since its inception, practiced by “founding fathers” and presidents who wrote and spoke about equality while engaging in the purchase, bondage, and sale of people of African descent. These policies were intended to subjugate people of color and afford dominance to white people. Ibram Kendi (2016) asserts that these policies led to racist ideas to justify the systemic barriers that created racial inequity and that each period of progress has been followed by a backlash of racist policies and practices. Abolition and the Civil War were followed by segregation enforced by laws, regulations, white mob violence, and lynchings. The civil rights movement and legislation were succeeded by cuts in taxes— primarily benefiting the wealthy—and federal assistance programs and the initiation of mass incarceration. The election of the first African American president has been followed by a curtailment in regulations and policies that enforce fair housing, reduce inequities in the criminal justice system, and protect consumers from racial targeting by predatory lenders. Looking ahead, major disruptive forces—technological innovation, increasingly frequent and severe climate events, and global economic change—could further widen today’s equity gaps. Moreover, demographic changes are making the nation more racially and ethnically diverse (Colby and Ortman 2015). Although many people are excited and proud about these changes, some fear the change of familiar social roles and ways of life (Danbold and Huo 2015). And this fear has resulted in a tendency to support less-inclusive policies (Craig and Richeson 2014). In the face of these profound challenges, civic leaders, advocates, elected officials, and philanthropists are confronting our country’s history of unjust and oppressive policies and taking action to promote equity and expand access to opportunity. Many approaches, like those that equip people of color with information and tools to successfully navigate existing systems, modify policies and practices to expand access and options, or enforce anti-discrimination protections, are making some progress. Other emerging strategies focus intentionally on the detrimental effects of past policies and offer bolder remedies that more directly address the roots of persistent inequities.

Washington, DC: Urban Institute 2019. 54p.

By Libby Hemphill

Social media platforms provide fertile ground for white supremacist networks, enabling farright extremists to find one another, recruit and radicalize new members, and normalize their hate. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter use content matching and machine learning to recognize and remove prohibited speech, but to do so, they must be able to recognize white supremacist speech and agree that it should be prohibited. Critics in the press1 and advocacy organizations still argue that social media companies haven’t been aggressive or broad enough in removing prohibited content. There is little public conversation, however, about what white supremacist speech looks like and whether white supremacists adapt or moderate their speech to avoid detection. Our team of researchers set out to better understand what constitutes English-language white supremacist speech online and how it differs from general or non-extremist speech. We also sought to determine whether and how white supremacists adapt their speech to avoid detection. We used computational methods to analyze existing sets of known white supremacist speech (text only) and compared those speech patterns to general or non-extremist samples of online speech. Prior work confirms that extremists use social media to connect and radicalize, and they use specific linguistic markers to signal their group membership. We sampled data from users of the white nationalist website Stormfront and a network of “alt-right” users on Twitter. Then, we compared their posts to typical, non-extremist Reddit comments.* We found that platforms often miss discussions of conspiracy theories about white genocide and Jewish power and malicious grievances against Jews and people of color. Platforms also let decorous but defamatory speech persist. With all their resources, platforms could do better. With all their power and influence, platforms should do better.

New York: ADL, 2022. 66p.

By F. A. Hayek.

Edited by W. W. Bartley Iii.. From the foreword: The reader who is struck by the pace and freshness of the argument of this new book, its vigorous application to specific cases, and its occasionally polemical thrust will want to know something of its background. In 1978, at the age of nearly eighty, and after a lifetime of doing battle with socialism in its many manifestations, Hayek wanted to have a showdown. He conceived of a grand formal debate, probably to be held in Paris, in which the leading theorists of socialism would face the leading intellectual advocates of the market order. They would address the question: ‘Was Socialism a Mistake?'. The advocates of the market order would argue that socialism was - and always had been - thoroughly mistaken on scientific and factual, even logical grounds, and that its repeated failures, in the many different practical applications of socialist ideas that this century has witnessed, were, on the whole, the direct outcome of these scientific errors.

London. Routledge. 1998. 186p.