Talitha Washington is a professor of mathematics at Howard University who is passionate about improving ethnic minority access to STEM subjects in the USA. Talitha, whose name comes from the Biblical verse “Talitha cumi”, literally meaning “little girl, get up!”, introduces herself as an activist, a mathematician, and a professor.

Talitha, the activist

Talitha Washington’s work on Elbert Frank Cox, the first black person in the world to earn a PhD in mathematics, has been shared on radio and television stations, as well as in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. They both grew up in Evansville, Indiana and both went on to teach at Howard University. Image reproduced with her permission.

The lack of diversity in sciences and mathematics is a sensitive topic, and how different generations interact with racism has drastically changed over the past few decades. “Typically, older generations, like our parents, used to say you should ‘act like a duck and shake off the water’, meaning if you encounter racially charged situations you just grit your teeth and persevere through it: you try not to let it affect you.” Talitha says that for people of her generation this was also the norm, even though it did not seem fair. However, for the younger generations, the situation is a little different. They have grown up with a black president in the United States and the promise that if you work hard you will be rewarded, independent of the colour of your skin. So if they “encounter racially charged situations they may or may not know what to do, or how to handle it. Instead they will say, ‘this is not for me — I am going somewhere else where I am already accepted, because this is not how it should be’. And we don’t want to lose the younger generations in STEM because of that.”
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