A growing body of evidence shows that positive student outcomes are associated with racial/ethnic diversity among university STEM instructors. However, few studies to date have been able to provide direct causal evidence identifying the specific mechanism(s) hypothesized to drive the benefits of instructor racial/ethnic diversity. Leaving these mechanisms unexplained may lead both receptive and critical readers to infer that race or ethnicity are somehow “natural” categories that “cause” such outcomes. In this narrative review, we eschew such racial essentialism in favor of an understanding of race as socially constructed, and use an ecological systems perspective to examine how multiple mechanisms of systemic racism operate inside and outside classrooms across multiple levels of analysis. Understanding how these mechanisms relate to each other, and how multiple interconnected mechanisms may drive the benefits of instructor racial/ethnic diversity, could inform the design of policies and practices to disrupt racism and advance equity. By integrating several bodies of psychological and sociological research on systemic racism in STEM and in higher education more broadly, we outline a multi-path model to explain how and under what circumstances STEM instructor racial/ethnic diversity may have particular effects on student experiences or outcomes. We use this model to generate predictions and recommend how researchers could test these predictions in future studies.

越来越多的证据表明，积极的学生成绩与大学 STEM 教师的种族/民族多样性有关。然而，迄今为止，很少有研究能够提供直接的因果证据，以确定假设推动教师种族/民族多样性的好处的具体机制。不解释这些机制可能会导致接受者和批判性读者推断，种族或民族在某种程度上是“导致”此类结果的“自然”类别。在这篇叙述性综述中，我们避开了这种种族本质主义，转而将种族理解为社会建构的种族，并使用生态系统视角来研究系统性种族主义的多种机制如何在课堂内外跨多个分析层次发挥作用。了解这些机制如何相互关联，以及多个相互关联的机制如何推动教师种族/民族多样性的好处，可以为破坏种族主义和促进公平的政策和实践的设计提供信息。通过整合关于 STEM 和更广泛高等教育中系统性种族主义的几个心理学和社会学研究机构，我们概述了一个多路径模型，以解释 STEM 教师种族/民族多样性如何以及在什么情况下可能对学生体验或结果产生特殊影响。我们使用此模型生成预测，并建议研究人员如何在未来的研究中测试这些预测。