A June 24th Plan Gets Serious
With COVID-19, Nerd Nite has had to go into a Zooming phase. With the George Floyd protests, one of its organizers, Anna Tatarko, felt the need to organize a gathering around the issues of systemic police racism and the need for reform.
“This month in June, what we want to do is focus on more local issues, centered around the issues of racism, institutional racism, police brutality,” she said.
The plan for now is June 24th, 7 p.m., via Zoom, the now widely used video conferencing platform, which the group already experimented with in May with a link: tiny.cc/nerdnitereno and the password: nerd. “We had a lot of people that I've never seen before tune in and people from outside Reno were tuning in,” Tatarko said of the first Zoom attempt. Nerd Nites, tag line “be there and be square”, have been around since 2003, and now take place monthly in over 100 cities around the world.
“I've reached out to some of the members of the local Black Lives Matter Facebook page and the people who lead it and I've been put in touch with three people through that and pitched the idea at them. And I I don't want to tell them here, this is what you have to talk about. We have started having some discussions about, these are the kind of the things that it would be interesting, I think to the Reno community, if we talk about them,” she said of plans for the upcoming June 24th Reno Nerd Nite. On Instagram, it was confirmed the speakers would be Nathaniel Phillipps, Elisha Harris and city councilman at-large Devon Reese.
Taking Part in #SHUTDOWNSTEM
Tatarko took part in the initial peaceful Black Lives Matter rally in downtown Reno in late May, and said she felt people’s anger from the outset. She also feels that after the subsequent night of violence, the movement returned to being more focused.
“We hope we can continue having these conversations and that it doesn't just fade away because these issues aren't being addressed and they're still here and that's a problem,” she said.
The Kansas native hasn’t been able to do her usual summer field work due to COVID-19. She says she believes pandemic forced cancellations also explains some of the people’s time to be more active with social issues right now. She recently took part in a #ShutDownSTEM online movement to address anti-Black racism in the realm of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.
“In the wake of the most recent murders of Black people in the U.S., it is clear that white and other non-Black people have to step up and do the work to eradicate anti-Black racism. As members of the global academic and STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] communities, we have an enormous ethical obligation to stop doing ‘business as usual,’” the organizers of #ShutDownSTEM said.
On the day we spoke with her, instead of working on her research, Tatarko said she was going to read articles about racism in academia and science, and participate in another Zoom call on the topic with other scientists and grad students.