I am a big believer in meditation and one of my favorite apps is Headspace. Users are encouraged to imagine the mind as a blue sky—the canvas onto which our thoughts and emotions appear. Clouds will inevitably roll in, representing anxiety and negative emotions, and, at times, those clouds may blanket the entire sky. But above the clouds, when you break through, the blue sky is always there. For years, my work has explored how psychology and the applied behavioral sciences provide tools for policy design, implementation, and evaluation. More recently, I have turned my attention to behavioral science’s role in the pursuit of equity. In November 2024, my friend and colleague Mindy Hernandez and I published our book, Antiracist by Design, as a call to action for behavioral scientists to help address structural racism in our systems and institutions. Our goal was to give behavioral scientists specific strategies for embedding antiracist practices into all stages of the research process—treating equity and antiracism not as a separate agenda, but as a core design feature. Since the book was released, hostility toward equity work has reached new extremes. The concept of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) has been weaponized to thwart efforts that attempt to address long-standing racial disparities in our social systems, recasting empirically grounded work as ideological rather than scientific. But authentic engagement with principles of diversity, antiracism, and inclusion is still vital and progress is still possible. As behavioral scientists, failing to engage with a race-aware perspective will…
