In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and disproportionately deadly impact of COVID-19 on communities of color, researchers have called for an end to institutional racism in scientific education, publishing, and funding.  In this talk, Lee will discuss the challenge of institutional racism for canonical theories of the social structure of science, present recent research on Black-white disparities in funding and peer review scores for applicants submitting to the National Institutes of Health’s oldest and most commonly used funding mechanism (the R01 grant), and discuss some implications of this work on alternative proposals for funding science.