The Legacy of William Shockley: Racism and Ableism in STEM

Abstract

William Shockley is memorialized in the names of several scientific terms, including "Shockley-Queisser limit" and "Shockley-Read-Hall recombination," which we frequently reference in photovoltaics. Shockley was a racist and a eugenicist who published prolifically in support of racist policies and racist ideas, including forced sterilization for those with lower IQ, a test result he correlated with Blackness. One step in purging the foundations of eugenics, racism and ableism, from modern science is to remove the names of their proponents from places of honor, including scientific terms.

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