On June 16, three weeks after the killing of George Floyd set off a wave of protests that would blaze across the globe, Joël Babdor received an unexpected email.

It was an invitation for Dr. Babdor, an immunologist at the University of California, San Francisco, to write a blog post to share his “personal experience as a Black man in academia,” the email said. The sender was a marketing manager from Springer Nature, a company that publishes Nature and thousands of other scientific journals. Springer Nature most likely needed little introduction, the email noted to Dr. Babdor, “since you have published with us before.”

Dr. Babdor recalled being excited and flattered by the message. But then, he said, “I started to spiral.”

Three years prior, he had been a first author on a paper published in Nature Immunology, a highly respected journal. But even after nearly a decade in his field, Dr. Babdor could not name more than a few other Black immunologists. He couldn’t help but wonder how much of an anomaly he was.

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