Finally it will make recommendations concerning how evolutionary biologists might learn from anti-racist struggles that are going on in other sectors of our society to move towards a more diverse and inclusive discipline. The commentary continues with providing the reader a sense of the current state of underrepresentation within the field and will provide some perspectives concerning ongoing issues that are maintaining this situation. This will be accomplished by also discussing the confluence between the history of evolutionary biology as a discipline and the social changes that allowed persons of African descent to pursue careers in higher education. Thus in this commentary I intend to provide the reader with a brief description of the cultural experiences of persons of African ancestry in the United States and how these have played a role in maintaining their underrepresentation in evolutionary biology careers. In this sense, evolutionary biologists are not different from the majority of non-African descended persons in this country that have little to no training or familiarity with the scholarly literature associated with the African American experience. It has been my experience that most non-African descended people in this field are woefully unaware of the dynamics that drive this historical disparity. As the first African American to have earned a PhD in evolutionary biology I have been concerned with this disparity for my entire career (Graves 2012).
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