How has science been predicated on erasures and untruths? How do our institutions contribute to exclusion and silencing, rather than trustful exchange or collaboration? Part of our 2021–2022 Institute’s Colloquium series Trusting Science, this event addresses these critical questions through a dialogue between science, technology, and society (STS) scholar Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, author of The Mobile Workshop: the Tsetse Fly and African Knowledge Production, and historian and legal scholar Helen Tilley, author of Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge. Considering personal experiences of mistrust and marginalization as integral to knowledge-making, we reflect on racism in science and its institutions, and ask the key question: what is to be done?