Totally Nothing To Do With F&SF and the 'Babe Bomb'
From Science and Social Inequality: Feminist and Postcolonial Issues by Sandra Harding:
...Yet a far more insidious and damaging project can get ignored when our focus is restricted to racial biases and prejudices. It turns out that the work of many biologists and biomedical scientists has made important contributions to advancing their cultures' racist projects even when the scientists themselves have not intended such consequences of their work, and sometimes even when they have explicitly intended to recruit science for antiracist projects. Nor is it only these biological and biomedical sciences that have participated in white supremacist projects.......The problems of interest to a culture's sciences at a given moment in history, the hypotheses proposed to explain such problems, the methods chosen to test those hypotheses, decisions about what should count as evidence for or against such hypotheses, or the goals to be achieved in resolving the problem--how could these aspects of sciences not contribute to maintaining the existing social structure and agendas of the white supremacist society that decides which scientific projects to support? A white supremacist society need not be one in which all or any white individuals intend or prefer their supremacy [emphasis mine]. It can also reasonably designate societies where most whites report that they oppose white supremacy, yet the values and social structures of the society de facto maintain racial inequality. In such cases, scientists can end up advancing white supremacist agendas though they have no intention of doing so....
...Today, much antiracism work has focused on helping individuals to improve themselves, to become antiracist individuals. They learn to identify their own beliefs and behaviors and to help others to do so also. Such work is valuable, but it will have little effect on changing racist social structures and widely shared assumptions unless it is actively put in the service of an antiracist political movement. The self-improvement of individuals is never an adequate substitute for collective political action against the white supremacist interests, policies and practices of dominant social institutions.....
Unconscious bias--we all have it. It is as inevitable a part of who we are as our education, our families and the places we grew up. To say, 'so and so is a good person, I'm sure she means well' says nothing about whether this process or that organization or this practice perptuates bias. We mean well or we're tired or it's a lot of trouble or we don't want to hurt anyone's feelings or it's easier or we just want to be comfortable and none of those are actually 'wrong' or 'bad' things. But many of those unconscious, don't-even-think-we-do-it, things are why there are fewer women in the 'hard' sciences and fewer women writing science fiction and fewer women in high level corporate positions and....
Also, part of being privileged is taking it for granted.