When Dorceta Taylor took her first biology course at Northeastern Illinois University, it quickly dawned on her that she was the only black undergrad in the room. Growing up in Jamaica, she’d always sat in science classes with black, white, Indian, and Chinese kids. “We did STEM like there’s no tomorrow,” she says. So then why, she wondered, were her science classes in the United States so uniform? Taylor posed the question to her professor, whose response was surprisingly unscientific. “African Americans aren’t interested,” he said. His generalization was based on a body of research that points to a lack of connections between black urbanites and nature. But as a member of that community, Taylor knew it wasn’t true. Her hunch was confirmed when she started finding cracks in the research. One touted analysis compared the perspectives of black children in New Haven, Connecticut, with perspectives from white adults in well-to-do suburbs. Class wasn’t factored...