The Evidence Collective elects Dr. Raven Baxter as a member
Members of The Evidence Collective, a network of scientists, clinicians and communicators, elected Dr. Raven Baxter to the group on March 4, 2026.
Red Table Talk airs Raven Baxter's account of racism in the science workplace
Jada Pinkett Smith's three-generation talk show premiered on Facebook Watch in 2018, drew 27 million views for its first episode and won a Daytime Emmy in 2021
Red Table Talk aired an interview with Raven Baxter on May 18, 2021, on the show's Facebook Watch page. The segment was part of its programming on the invisible Black woman, and Baxter spoke about life as a Black woman in science.
Her segment followed the show's May 13 episode, "The Invisible Black Women Epidemic." Jada Pinkett Smith, Willow Smith and Adrienne Banfield-Norris welcomed guests including activist Tamika Mallory, writer and professor Tressie McMillan Cottom and physician Dr. Tamika Cross, according to ET Online.
That episode came weeks after police in Columbus, Ohio, killed 16-year-old Ma'Khia Bryant in April 2021. TheGrio reported that Mallory spoke about Bryant on the show. The outlet also cited federal data showing Black women die of pregnancy-related causes at two to three times the rate of white women. Baxter's segment added the science workplace to a conversation centered on policing and health care.
Baxter had told her story in public a year earlier. In June 2020, during the #BlackInTheIvory movement, she gave a first-person account to Mother Jones. It ran under the headline "I'm a Black Female Scientist. On My First Day of Work, a Colleague Threatened to Call the Cops on Me."
She had just started teaching biology at a community college in western New York. She was checking her mail when a white colleague stopped her. "I'm gonna need to see your identification," the colleague said, as Baxter recounted it. Baxter showed her faculty ID, and the colleague still threatened to call the police.
A department secretary finally vouched for her. "You just don't look like you could work here," the colleague said, and walked away without an apology. Baxter told Mother Jones she was about 23 at the time.
"There's a difference between a misunderstanding and threatening to call the police," she said in the same account.
Red Table Talk premiered on Facebook Watch on May 7, 2018, with three generations of one family at the table. Its first episode had drawn 27 million views by July 2018. Five weeks after Baxter's segment, on June 25, 2021, the show won its first Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Informative Talk Show. It ran five seasons before Meta ended its Facebook Watch originals in 2023.
Baxter, a molecular biologist and science communicator known online as Raven the Science Maven, was then a doctoral candidate at the University at Buffalo. Her research there focused on science communication.
More about the show is on the Red Table Talk website.
