The Acknowledgment Project
Our goal is to identify and pursue untapped opportunities to educate Americans about the concept of race. By transforming stereotypical public narratives, we aim to foster better public health, employment, housing, and academic outcomes for all Americans. While racialized categories are used in various contexts, our purpose is not to eradicate these categories but to facilitate a deeper understanding of their use and purpose. We recognize the dissonance created by continued use of these categories and the importance of tracking trends and disparities due to racism and discrimination.
About Us
The Acknowledgment Project began at Harvard University's Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI), an organization dedicated to building a diverse, global community of experienced leaders.
ALI's mission is to provide world-class education, skill-building, and collaboration opportunities to its members, enabling sustainable social impact at scale.
Learn more about ALI's vision, mission, and history here.
The Organizing Team
Karen Valentía Clopton
Project Convener
Karen Valentía Clopton brings to our team deep expertise in environmental sustainability, social justice, global ethics, and corporate governance. Elected Chair three terms for San Francisco's Human Rights Commission, she served as General Counsel/Vice President for Access and Inclusion, Incendio International; Chief Administrative Law Judge, California Public Utilities Commission; General Counsel, California Department of Corporations; Chief of Operations, Port of San Francisco; and Chief of Operations/Corporate Counsel, San Francisco State University Foundation, Inc. Karen's non-profit board and leadership service includes the American Red Cross, National Association of the Administrative Law Judiciary, Jack and Jill of America, Inc., KQED Community Advisory Panel, and the League of Women Voters. Nationally recognized award-winning equal rights advocate, Karen is an active alumna of Vassar College and Antioch School of Law. She is a Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow.
Cameron Gilbert
Healthcare Operations Lead
Cameron Gilbert, Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow, brings to our team extensive leadership expertise in healthcare business operations, clinical operations, and regulatory affairs. As the founder and CEO of NeuroPsychiatric Hospitals (NPH), Cameron opened and operated 16 hospitals that merged psychiatry, internal medicine, and neurology into a specialized system. The NPH system focused on treating patients with both severe mental illness and medical neurological disorders in a comprehensive and integrated manner. After completing his PhD, Cameron worked in numerous healthcare charities as a clinician and founder in clinics in Haiti, east Africa, and rural Indiana. He is currently involved in missionary work in India, Russia, and urban America. He is excited about the public health ramifications of the project.
Mackenzie Thomas
Technology and AI Ethics Lead
Mackenzie Thomas' career sits at the intersection of technology and civic engagement. Her 10+ years at Google are marked by relentless advocacy for marginalized communities in the development of core products, like Search & YouTube. Today, she drives responsible AI efforts, ensuring safety and fairness is centered in model development and deployment. Previously, Mackenzie led efforts to build innovative public-private partnerships that help millions of Americans return to the civilian workforce, register to vote, and get aid after natural disasters. Mackenzie is a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community and graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill and the Harvard Kennedy School.
Matt Ogden
Private Equity and Business Strategy Lead
Matt Ogden brings to our team experience in entrepreneurship and private equity investing. Prior to ALI, Matt founded Building Industry Partners (BIP), a leading private equity investment firm focused on the essential U.S. building sector. Matt began evolving BIP's strategy to pioneer broad-based employee ownership and human capital management (HCM) advancement in the building sector. Matt believes that alignment of interests amongst industrial businesses and their workforce holds a "virtuous cycle" power, which if engaged systemically across a sector, can elevate that sector's aggregate employee value proposition (EVP), performance, and shared prosperity.
Mark Lewis
Mark Lewis is the website designer and an essential member of the technology team. With years of experience in eCommerce and technology, Mark has been instrumental in developing this professional, user-friendly platform.
Acknowledging the Non-Scientific Basis of Race
Acknowledgment Statement
We recommend including an acknowledgment that racialized categories are not based on actual science, medicine, or biology when collecting demographic data.
Website Repository
Develop a website with scholarship and popular media addressing human genome mapping, DNA research, historic development of racial categories, and statements from medical associations.
Measuring Efficacy
Track the number of respondents accessing the website, completing surveys on prior knowledge, and monitoring which links receive the most views.
Proof of Concept: Harvard's Teachly Tool

1

Identify Opportunity
Use Harvard University's Teachly software tool as a proof of concept to address Harvard's role in legitimating "race science".

2

Implement Acknowledgment
Add the acknowledgment statement and a link to either the AMA statement on race or a website prototype before data collection.

3

Launch Timeline
Implement the acknowledgment before the fall academic semester in 2024.
Global Impact and Challenges
International Influence
This approach can influence international students and workers who may hold archaic views on race due to America's global economic and media influence.
Obstacles
Challenges include those who believe racialized categories are intransigent, confusion with the "one race" theory, and calls for complete eradication of these categories.
Urgency
There is urgency due to the rise of anti-scientific legislative initiatives and white supremacist groups, which pose a threat to American democratic institutions.
Collaborative Approach
Academia
Engage universities and research institutions to provide scientific backing and educational resources.
Corporate DNA Entities
Partner with companies like 23andMe and Ancestry to leverage their genetic research and data.
Medical Associations
Collaborate with national and international medical associations to provide expert opinions and statements.
Digital Technology Experts
Work with tech experts to develop and implement the website repository and data collection tools.
Beneficiaries and Expected Outcomes

1

Informed Public
Everyone who becomes fully informed that race is not based on science, medicine, or biology will benefit from this project.

2

Improved Health Outcomes
Better understanding of race can lead to more effective public health strategies and improved health outcomes for all communities.

3

Reduced Discrimination
By challenging stereotypes based on debunked race science, we can work towards reducing discrimination in employment, housing, and education.

4

Innovation and Progress
Reconsidering reliance on stereotypes can lead to more innovative ideas from diverse sources, benefiting society as a whole.
Implementation: Teachly Student Survey
Resources for Understanding American History, Race Science, Implicit Bias, and Tools for Making Change
  • Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown, Holt Paperbacks
  • Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields
  • The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics, Evelynn M. Hammonds and Rebecca M. Herzig
  • Michael Yudell and Evelynn M. Hammonds, "What it means to abandon race in science?" Experimental Physiology 2024; 109:1246-1248.
  • Rethinking Race and Ethnicity in Biomedical Research, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2024, Washington, D.C.: the National Academies Press https://doi.org/10.17226/27913.
  • Inhuman Bondage, the Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, David Brion Davis
  • Africans in America, Charles Johnson, Patricia Smith, and the WGBH Series Research Team
  • The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary Criticism, Paula M. L. Moya
  • Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities, Craig Steven Wilder
  • News for All the People, The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, Juan Gonzalez and Joseph Torres
  • The Half Has Never Been Told "Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism", Edward E. Baptist
  • Slavery by Another Name, The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, Douglas A. Blackmon
  • Blink by Malcolm Gladwell