Just Keeping Swimming
When a senior male scientist claimed the data from sawfish she’d tagged, Jasmin Graham –an early career shark researcher in Florida– felt powerless. It was not one individual’s behavior but the failure of the larger scientific community to take appropriate action was frustrating.
Dejected, Graham quit graduate school. Working late one night soon thereafter on a research paper that might be her last, Graham scrolled on Twitter and found herself swept up in the trending #BlackinNature and connected with three other Black women shark scientists she had never met before.
On Juneteenth 2020, within weeks of meeting on Twitter, the quartet formed Minorities in Shark Sciences (MISS)— a group devoted to providing opportunities and support to any minority of color studying sharks. Catherine Macdonald, a white shark scientist who was all too familiar with the misogyny, discrimination, harassment, assault, and bullying rampant in the field, offered the group the use of a research vessel, docked in Miami, for a meet-up. Finding community reinvigorated Graham and convinced her to recommit to pursuing shark science on her own terms. Her new memoir, Sharks Don’t Sink, documents how a young Black woman dared to establish herself as a shark scientist outside academia. The book is also an ode to sharks themselves.
Graham fell in love with the ocean as a child when she went fishing with her father every summer in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. At a summer camp in high school, she learned “marine scientist” was an actual job. She held a shark—a bonnethead— for the first time as an undergraduate researcher and fell in love with the creature, which was “all muscle and hydrodynamic perfection.”
Sharks are prehistoric creatures that have survived all five known mass extinctions, but more than a quarter of the world’s identified shark species are now threatened by extinction. Much research in shark science, Graham writes, is based on the idea that if we can better understand these creatures, we can better protect them.
The public mostly tends to see sharks as deadly killers – likely thanks, in part, to the fictional Great White featured in the 1975 Hollywood thriller Jaws. They are rarely viewed as diverse, fascinating creatures that play a key role in maintaining balance in marine ecosystems. Graham, who sees herself and her people in sharks, writes, “All too often Black people are perceived and treated much like sharks: feared, misunderstood, and brutalized, often without recourse; assumed to be threatening when so often we’re the ones under threat; portrayed unfairly in the media, so that others are predisposed to have a negative interaction with us.” She works to change people’s perception, providing diversity, equity, and inclusion training at universities to prevent attrition of talented people of color.
Scientists, she writes, often have a particularly hard time accepting their biases because they believe themselves to be entirely rational. So she gives them tangible tools they can use to ensure that they are not making unfair assumptions about minority students or mentees.
Graham has moved forward with her shark research as well. She published the paper that caused her so much angst with a robust dataset gathered through collaboration. The scientist who took her data resigned. Macdonald — “the original Friend of MISS”—took his place.
Graham, who now serves on the board of the American Elasmobranch Society, could decide to earn her PhD and re-enter the academy, but she chooses to remain an independent researcher. “Going forward, I’m committed to contributing to peer-reviewed, quality publications, and doing research in a**hole- free spaces, only,” she writes.
For her next project, Graham plans to collect information about fishing stock and patterns from Black fishermen who have been fishing in Myrtle Beach for decades. In conservation circles, she writes, most assume that small fishers, especially those of color, are uneducated and have little to contribute to scientific research. Graham knows this is wrong.
She will also continue her work with MISS. “I truly can’t wait for the day when MISS no longer needs to exist,” she writes, “when we don’t need to fight to be heard or create a safe space. But, until then, we are here to help you insulate you as much as we can from the BS we had coming up.”
Sharks Don’t Sink is an accessible book about life as a marine scientist – and an empowering one. Graham writes in a simple, direct way about the sexism and racism many in the sciences have become inured to. Doing nothing, she reminds readers—whether in response to social injustice or to the destruction of the natural world— supports the status quo. We owe it to ourselves and to the planet to take action.