American Scientist

Astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi, author of the memoir A Quantum Life: My Unlikely Journey from the Streets to the Stars, doesn’t fit the mold: He’s an unusual person who followed an unusual path to become a scientist. His nonconformity is what I enjoyed most about him when I interviewed him in the podcast (below). Oluseyi is on a quest to ignite a stellar spark in underrepresented groups and I think he is going to be very successful in that regard. Indeed, I’m an amateur astronomer, a Black woman raised in rural North Carolina, and my conversation with him left me feeling enthusiastic about my love of all things celestial.

Transcript

Kindra Thomas: How many trillions of dollars are in the STEM economy—

[music starts]

—the economic opportunities associated with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math?

Hakeem Oluseyi: The fact is that there are entire communities that are just like, “No, we're not going to participate in that because it involves math and I'm trying to avoid math—you know, whatever major is the least amount of math, that's where I'm going,” right? That's where we find ourselves. And I find it an injustice.

Kindra Thomas: On this episode of the American Scientist podcast, an interview with astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi on his book, A Quantum Life: My Unlikely Journey from the Streets to the Stars. I’m Kindra Thomas.

[music ends]

Kindra Thomas: Hakeem Oluseyi started out his life as James Plummer, Jr. When he was just four years old, his family, he writes, “busted apart.” By age six, his gangbanger cousins had taught him the rules of the street, including who he could look in the eye and who he couldn’t. Other writers have described the transformation of James Plummer, Jr., to Hakeem Oluseyi, the sole Black physicist inside NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. But Oluseyi tells his own coming-of-age story in A Quantum Life: My Unlikely Journey from the Streets to the Stars. He dedicates the book, his first, “To all who reach for the stars and to those who teach them.” So I began our interview by asking Oluseyi at what point his curiosity got him noticed by teachers instead of getting him in trouble. Here’s our interview.

Hakeem Oluseyi: For me, you know, I'm living every day just as a kid would, right? You wake up. You’re not putting too much thought into it. So I always like something new, a new challenge. So, as I had various interests like science, music, humor, you know, these sorts of things, they would lead to new adventures, right? Of course, I was led there by teachers initially. So, one of the things that was unusual about my upbringing is the fact that I moved every year for a decade, and several times a year. And so in one of those places, finally teachers started saying, “Hey, I'm going to grab you and put you into this thing.” Okay, so my English teacher was like, “Oh, I'm going to put you in drama club.” My math teachers were like, “Oh, you're going to be in math club.” And you know, I got to say, "God bless teachers," because they saw the kid who clearly had issues, but also who had some talents. And they were like, “Listen, I'm going to help direct you into something that will benefit you in the future." So it was all of that direction from the adults that channeled my curiosities into more productive directions, right? So I used to say that extracurricular activity saved my life, because it was through these extracurricular activities that I stepped out of my home community to go and compete with others and learn that I was competitive on these larger scales. And then I was motivated to do it because, starting from the age of nine, I became aware of the racial issues of our country and how people—you know, that was a huge driving force—the fact that people would prejudge me and the people like me. And so when I was nine years old is when I was like, “Okay, you think I'm inferior to you? I'll show you who's inferior," right? So, my competitiveness and my defiance are kind of what—and then people leading me and redirecting my activities—are kind of what led me on the path, right? It wasn't, “Oh, I love science. I'm going to become a scientist,” you know, because I didn't know any way—you know, nobody around me had become a scientist. No one around me had become an engineer. So even if I thought to myself, “Oh, I’m going to become Dr. Hakeem,” it really didn't mean anything, right? It was aspirational without having a real vision of what I was aspiring to.

Kindra Thomas: Do you feel like the lack of a sense of belonging that a lot of African Americans have in these spaces is a reason why they don’t pursue things like that?

Hakeem Oluseyi: It’s more than just a lack of belonging. There’s a repulsion. There’s a repulsion. Like, when I lived—I’m talking about my youth, right, the story that’s in the book, right—so basically I lived in a segregated, racially segregated community in Mississippi. So when did white people show up in my community? They were either the police, right? They showed up to our football games. They showed up to every gathering in rural Jasper County, Mississippi. There were the people running for office, right? They would show up at church and make their pitch for you to vote for them. There were people that came around to collect cash, like the insurance man. You know, other than that, you didn't really have personal interactions with people. So you know it's easy to reflect on the worst of the interactions that you have, right, the Emmitt Till–type interactions, the police interactions, the jerk who wants to feel like they're better than somebody and so they pull some racist B.S., right? So that's all my interactions with white people before I leave home, you know? And so I'm going to correct something right now. A lot of people—a lot of us—say, “Oh, you know, being Black in America.” Let me tell you, the problem isn't being Black. It never was, never will be, right? The problem is—you know, you're Black when you interact with good people, you're Black when you interact with kind people and polite people and respectful people, and there's no problem then. The problem is the person you’re interacting with, not you—if they're discriminatory, if they're, you know, of small mind and that sort of thing, right? Then they use your physical characteristics to feel better than you. And the other thing that's bad about the racial thing is we associate it with hate. And I find that most of the time it's not people hating each other. It's people wanting to feel better than each other, right? Hierarchy is what I think it is most of the time. And so if you look at the deterrents to students wanting to go into areas where they don't see themselves reflected, you know—and the thing about science and STEM is that it is a hostile environment to everyone, in a way, because the default setting is skepticism, right? The default setting is to challenge everything that everyone says, because that's how you get to truth, you know? “Okay, thank you, I accept your error bars and your measurement!”—it doesn't work that way, right? And all of this comes in when you talk about careers and choices. You know, if you look at your undereducation, so by the time you’re at the point of “I'm postpubescent and I'm choosing a career,” so much has happened to shape your choices that, in a way, they're not really choices at all.

Kindra Thomas: I used to watch the Science Channel a lot because I'm a science nerd. And I was watching Outrageous Acts of Science. And all of a sudden, I heard this really deep voice echoing from my television.

[Audio Outtake from Outrageous Acts of Science, Season 1, Episode 1]
Hakeem Oluseyi: It was very impressive to see that structure handle those stresses. They could really throw some massive weight around, including multiple cars at one time.
[End audio outtake]

Kindra Thomas: And I was like, "That's a Black dude!" I remember running over to the television and being like, “Who is this guy who sounds like my homeboy talking about science?”

Hakeem Oluseyi: Right.

Kindra Thomas: Because I used to talk to my friends about the show, and they're like, “I have no idea what you're talking about. Never heard of the show.” But I just loved it so much.

Hakeem Oluseyi: Wow.

Kindra Thomas: And then I saw you, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, you look cool. This dude is cool!”

Hakeem Oluseyi: Right.

Kindra Thomas: And then I just kept watching to like, get more content. Because just the fact that you just seemed like a homeboy, but you were discussing science so—you were excited about it and you didn't seem to be ashamed to be so excited about it.

Hakeem Oluseyi: No.

Kindra Thomas: And I was like, “Oh, I love that.” And so, fast forward a few years later. I'm working at NASA. And, I get on the elevator, exactly, and who was there but you? And you were the kindest, most genuine and graceful person. And I was like, “I'm a fan for life.”

Hakeem Oluseyi: Oh my God.

Kindra Thomas: And then moving forward, reading your story in your book, just made me even more admiring of the person you are.

Hakeem Oluseyi: That is so, so sweet. Thank you for filling that blank in.

Kindra Thomas: You worked at NASA. There was an overlap. Do you feel like you wrote the book for people like me, who don’t necessarily see themselves as scientists and who also may be in situations where it seems unfathomable to reach the space that you’re in?

Hakeem Oluseyi: You nailed it. You absolutely nailed it. You know, I coined this phrase that I felt like people were saying to me over the course of my career—you know, going to back to the ‘90s—and the phrase is, “Hakeem, I thought I was dumb until I met you, or until I saw you.” Right? I feel like, you know, both society and academia does a mind game on us, and that's why we get the results we get. So I have different approaches to education. And people feel like, “Oh my God, you're a great educator. You're a great mentor.” But my approaches for the most part I picked up along the way, right? There's a few of my own innovations, but a lot of it is, “Oh, look how the military educates in comparison to how universities educate." You know, "Look at what I learned working on the farm. Oh, that's useful here in STEM.” You know, it's a lot of that kind of bringing my experience from another world to help other people because they relate to those same experiences. And a big part of education, I find, is that the first step is always, "Remove barriers and make connections." There's actually been research—there was a study done on STEM attainment, and what they used, the metric they used, was who gets a patent, these researchers. And so what they found was that the people who get patents are those who were exposed to people who had patents. But it was even more granular than that. If they had the same—it was most effective when they had the same demographic profile. So if a Black girl sees a Black woman with patents, that increased the probability she's going to get patents many times, right? It's that direct reflection of one's self in a particular achievement. And understand that attracting people into STEM is difficult no matter what your race, no matter what your financial standing, right? It's not—well, it depends. Engineering gets more, but if you look at something like the pure sciences, they're never going to be the largest major at a university, right? They're going to be one of the smallest majors at the university, right? People are put off by it. So how do you attract people to it? It's not by talking about a block sliding down a plane or a ladder sitting against a wall, I can tell you that.

Kindra Thomas: So when you look at students who decide to go to HBCUs [Historically Black Colleges and Universities], do you feel as though going to a university where everyone looks like you—do you feel like there's safety in those spaces because it's more familiar? And when you're in those spaces but you go on to work in environments that are more diverse, do you think those [HBCU] environments don't prepare you for some of the things that you're going to encounter, because you've been around people that look like you and now you're in a world where people are going to challenge you in ways that are probably going to make you uncomfortable?

Hakeem Oluseyi: Right, right. You know, I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all solution to just about anything, right? So I think that an HBCU was correct for me, and it is right for a lot of people. And the reason why is, you know, there's something to be said for getting older. You know, living and learning. So had I stepped into Stanford University as a 19-year-old or an 18-year-old in comparison to stepping in there as a 24- or 25-year-old, it's a completely different person, right? It's almost like, if you're a parent, you know, you love your little toddler. They're so fun. Then the kid reaches puberty and they're a completely different person. It's a different human being, right? Look up another decade, completely different person. You know, we're like different humans in different eras. So what's right for you at that 17-to-22-year-old era, time period, 17 to 24 or 25, might be different when you're talking about now the next four or five years. So there are these programs called bridge programs, where you have to bridge—you know, the idea is that there's a variation in K-12 education. And some people are not going to be as well-educated academically as others. And there's a variation in undergraduate education, right, and some people aren't going to be as well-educated. So let's bridge the gap before throwing you into the deep end of the really tough, most difficult stuff. So I think that HBCUs bridge a different gap. It's not necessarily the academic gap, although, you know, that's necessary sometimes as well. But I think there's something for maturity, for professionalism, for you know, getting out of the house. Think about what's happened to you. If you look at people that study the psychology of African Americans, you know, you are an 18, 19 year old and you've received all this messaging your entire life, you know, about the hierarchy of the United States and what's expected of you given where you fit as a whatever—your color, sexuality, sex, all these things, economic level. And you know, there's a lot that has to be dealt with. You know, you're moving from a side stream into the mainstream. And there's some acclimation that has to be done. But it's not like a person coming in there out of a vacuum. You're coming there out of a system that has placed you and informed you that you're at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy. So how do you—what type of growth do you need and what's necessary for you? You know, it's not necessarily going to be addressed at places that are unaware or—you know, sometimes awareness isn't explicit. We all know it, and no one ever speaks it. We address it, but it's never spoken. I feel like HBCUs do that, right, in bridging that gap of what African American students need. And when I was at my HBCU, Tougaloo College, we had an exchange program with Brown University. And so the two white students you'd see on campus every year, other than the one professor's son, were the Brown students. But what was interesting is, very frequently the Brown students would transfer and complete their degree at Tougaloo. So what was it about this HBCU that drove these non–African Americans to value it so much that they said, “I'm going to pass on my Ivy League degree and get this HBCU degree in Mississippi”? There's something there that's of value to many people, not just African Americans.

Kindra Thomas: A sense of belonging, a sense of community…

Hakeem Oluseyi: Yes.

Kindra Thomas: People actually support each other.

Hakeem Oluseyi: That's true.

Kindra Thomas: So when you moved on to Stanford from Tougaloo, you talk about having to deal with the class anxiety at that point. Realizing that there was a separation despite your color based on your background and what your parents did and how you grew up and the money.

Hakeem Oluseyi: How you speak.

Kindra Thomas: Correct, right. So how did you navigate that?

Hakeem Oluseyi: Yeah, so, you know, on the one hand, what you get out of something depends on in large part what you put into it, right, and who you are as a person. So I've always been incredibly open-minded, and an adventurer, and an explorer, right? Not everybody is that way. So dealing with it, for me—you know, I'm not eager to be offended. I like to be practical about life. And so when I got there, I held a lot of ideas that I later did not hold about things racial and otherwise, right? So for example, when I left Mississippi, I literally thought every white person was a racist. That was my experience, right? Then I come to Stanford University and I have a lot of experiences that, you know, are similar to racist experiences. And my mind would automatically go to, “This is racism that I am experiencing right now.” So the example I often give is, when people speak to you like they feel like they're superior to you, right, it triggers your racist radar. But then I came to learn, oh, physicists? They think they're superior to everyone! So I learned, “Oh, you're not a racist, you're an [bleep]! There's a difference! I get it! Right? There's a difference. And I learned to deal with people as individuals. Everybody is an individual regardless of your skin color, regardless of your academic—and so that has led to so much richness in my life, because literally, at one day, I'm like in the middle of Zambia killing a goat with a member of the Samburu and Masai tribes, and a few weeks later I'm having lunch with a billionaire. And it’s like, “Okay, you're a human and you're a human. And I'm a human. And we're all the same. So stop trippin'.”

Kindra Thomas: Right

Hakeem Oluseyi: But, you know, the thing is, there are the jerks that you meet along the way. And so I was immediately set upon by my fellow students and some members of the faculty who felt like, you know, their hierarchy was, “Oh, he's not one of us.” So you’ll see a phenomenon where, “Why is it that everyone who works closely with this person thinks highly of them, but the people who don't work with them at all feel like they don't belong?” It wasn't just the white people. It was the Black people, too. Remember, I was country. And I was stepping on the West Coast, you know, and I was like, “Man, these Black people pronounce all their consonants! What's up with them?” You know? So yeah, I had to assimilate. The first thing I had to do was change the way I speak so that people could understand me. Because I was super fast, right? We dropped the Ns off all our words and dropped half our consonants where I come from. I just love to take people down to Mississippi, and, you know, the same thing happens every time when I take a guest. You know, after a day or two they look at me and they go, “Do you really understand what people are saying, or are you just faking it?” I’m like “No, I really do, because I slip right back into it when I'm there.” So when I first got there, I felt like I had to be someone I wasn't, in a way. I saw how people spoke differently. I saw how people operated differently. And it wasn't a race thing. It was a class thing. The African Americans around me might as well have been, you know, any other race around me. It wasn’t—I didn't feel the same commonality like I would with Southerners. I felt like I wanted to run home, even though I couldn’t run home. I felt a sense of—in the book I tell the story of how these guys explicitly were mean to me, my fellow physics students, okay? I only needed to have one such experience until, “I'm not hanging out with y'all no more, in any fashion. I'm done with you people, because you guys clearly aren't interested in being kind to me, so why am I going to put myself in this position?” But eventually, in about year three, I said, “You know what, screw it. I'm just going to be me.” And that really helped me tremendously, right? The world didn't fall apart. It's just like as I've developed in my career, okay? What I've seen as a mentor is that I have a lot of mentees who encountered a critical moment at which they were about to go off the path. And there was an intervention. You know, I intervened in [the lives of] my personal mentees. But just like people intervened in my life, I intervened in theirs, and you get them by that moment—then, you know, they can continue on. Or you lead them to, “Hey, I see you, and I see what you're capable of, and I see what you want. So let me lead you to something that you don't know about, but I know about because I happen to be several decades older and have more experience, right? So let me introduce this to you.” Because the thing that's really the big injustice to me, if you think about the STEM economy, how many billions, hundreds of billions, trillion dollars are in the STEM economy? And for the fact that there are entire communities that are just like, “No, we're not going to participate in that because it involves math and I'm trying to avoid math—you know, whatever major is the least amount of math, that's where I'm going,” right? That's where we find ourselves. And I find it an injustice, because you look at other communities, and they feel like, “Hey, that's where the good opportunities are, I'm going to go there.” And what you see is “Oh, dude, you have your PhD, this that and the other, but you're also dumb as dirt. So why did my homie over here who's brilliant not do the same thing, right?” Because of identity and the messaging of the world and the lack of training and examples around you, and you know, it's all these factors that go into it. But, you know, as a person that goes out and speaks to the youth, as a person that trains people, you definitely see that people have a sense of where they belong and what they're entitled to and what they should do. And it's a tough thing to address. But, you know, address it we shall.

Kindra Thomas: Yes. Do you ever resent the fact that you have to be so much more equipped to handle so many more—just to, like, overcome so many things?

Hakeem Oluseyi: No, I haven’t been resentful of that. You know, once I hit about 30, I’m just like, once I found peace and centering—I guard it and I value it. And, you know, I don’t have a place for resentment or jealousy or wishing things were different than how they were, right? What I have is a lot of energy to work to make things different than what they are. You know, meet them where they are and then, you know, if they want it—you know, the problem I have is that it’s not an option for so many of us, right? And so I want people to have options and choices. And, you know, I want to get rid of these identity thoughts that we have: “Oh, you’re Black? You’re good at sports. Oh, you’re Asian? You’re good at math. Oh, you’re white, you’re— you know, that’s B.S., right? So that’s my approach to it. And, you know, engage, inspire, empower. That’s where I’m coming from. And to the extent that I have days and years left in me, that’s what I’m going to be working on. You know, I’m going to be working on making people that are hard and resilient and, you know, have the grit to succeed despite the circumstances.

[music starts]

Kindra Thomas: Well thank you, Dr. Oluseyi.

Hakeem Oluseyi: Thank you, ma’am.

Kindra Thomas: I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me.

Hakeem Oluseyi: You’re awesome. Loved it so much. Loved chatting with you.

Kindra Thomas: That was astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi speaking with me about his book, A Quantum Life: My Unlikely Journey from the Streets to the Stars. For a transcript of this podcast, please visit our website –www.AmericanScientist.org – and go to our Science Culture blog.

You’ve been listening to a podcast from American Scientist magazine, published by Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society. This podcast was produced by Robert Frederick. I’m Kindra Thomas. Thank you for joining us.

[music ends]

Editor's Note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.