In the interest of open discussion, here are some problematic statements I have heard in European collaborations in last few weeks re. anti-racism work in physics: 1) collaboration members may not agree with being against racism, we dont want to make statements against racism..

...as they are political (reply: science is political); 2) re. role models who are BIPOC -- if there are two candidates (one white, one a POC) of equivalent ability, it would be discrimination to white people to give the leadership the POC (reply: racism uses power differential)

3) re support for BLM, but "black people are racist against whites in some country" (reply: think think think); 4) shouldn't discuss racism in europe in connection to immigration, as the white irish were discriminated when they went to USA (reply: I am coming back to this one);

5) tax payers probably dont care about the demographics of who does the science, as long as it is done so why would we care about equity (reply: really???)....I could go on and on but really I significantly overestimated my community in the past.