Black voices in physics: Clifford Johnson

This interview is part of PT‘s “Black voices in physics” series of Q&As with Black physicists.

Theoretical physicist Clifford Johnson chose his path as a child. “All children start out as scientists, exploring the world and doing experiments,” he says. “When I learned that you could do this for a living, I knew I wanted to be a scientist when I grew up.” At some point, someone asked him what type of scientist he wanted to be. “I have this memory of going to the dictionary and looking for every -ist and -ologist and reading the definitions. I picked physics because the dictionary said it underlies everything.”

Born in the UK, Johnson spent some of his formative childhood years on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. He returned to the UK as a young teenager and later earned a bachelor’s degree at Imperial College London and a PhD in physics at the University of Southampton. He did postdocs at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He held faculty posts in the US and the UK before being wooed by the University of Southern California, where he has been a professor since 2003. His research focuses on high-energy physics, black holes, and superstring theory.

PT: What sorts of barriers have you dealt with as a Black physicist?

JOHNSON: Throughout my entire career, I’ve had to run faster and jump higher and achieve more just to be treated the same as everyone else. On both sides of the Atlantic, both as a student and at more senior levels, I have had occasions where people have told me I was not cut out for this type of work. They didn’t say, “because you are Black,” but you can fill in the blanks. There are overt and covert barriers, overt and covert racism.

It’s notable that I’m reasonably successful, reasonably well known in the physics community. I’ve been funded by NSF and the Department of Energy. But I have never in my career had enough funding to support a postdoc. I have been spectacularly underfunded, and that in turn hampers my research.

PT: Do you feel welcome in the field now?

JOHNSON: Despite how well I have done, I feel I have always struggled with being taken seriously, especially in the crucial early and middle periods in my career. For example, there have been cases where I have made suggestions that have turned out to have huge implications, but the ideas were not taken seriously until someone else said them. The field makes progress collectively, so taking each other’s ideas seriously and moving them forward is a major aspect. It can be extremely demoralizing and damaging to not be taken seriously, to have your ideas ignored or attributed to others.

And it’s amazing how quickly people forget what you have done. The main struggle now is the attitude “What have you done for me lately?,” which I think is unevenly applied. I’m not saying people should rest on their laurels, but that attitude is applied with wildly variable standards, and people of color suffer from the fact that the threshold gets raised for no other reason than that they are different. It’s extremely damaging at all career stages.

I’ve sat on review panels for funding agencies, and I’ve seen how those panels work when I am in the room, with strongly stated and often unsubstantiated opinions swaying decisions. It does not fill me with confidence about what happens when I’m not in the room and I am the one being discussed.

PT: How do you persevere?

JOHNSON: A universal characteristic of physicists, race aside, is that the subject can produce a certain kind of single-mindedness. You have to learn to ignore a lot of noise and look for patterns and principles. A certain extreme doggedness is a major skill of the job. Those same skills are useful armor. It can be exhausting, but you have to shake off the obstacles and just do the work you love.

And there is the attitude of “I’ll show you that you are wrong about me.” But mostly, even though it would be nice to get recognition and a decent level of funding, at the end of the day I am still that kid who was fixing a radio and wanting to know how a microscope works. I love the craft.