Math professors and educators at leading American universities have taken to Twitter in order to debate whether math is racist.
Some asserted that objective mathematics is rooted in “white supremacist patriarchy” and white social constructs.
The debate itself was rooted in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, in which citizens of a fictional totalitarian state believe that 2 plus 2 equals 5 as a result of government propaganda.
Laurie Rubel, who teaches math education at Brooklyn College, says that the idea of math being culturally neutral is a "myth," and that asking whether 2 plus 2 equals 4 "reeks of white supremacist patriarchy."
“Y’all must know that the idea that math is objective or neutral IS A MYTH,” she tweeted.
Good luck building your house—or bridges, or airplanes, or anything else—on the basis of 2 + 2 = 5. And this nonsense is coming from someone who purportedly "teaches math education," i.e., she's teaching teachers how to teach math. Fuck.
Not that I'm really all that surprised. Back when I was in grad school twenty years ago, the idea of math being racist and/or a purely Western construction (therefore oppressive) was in vogue among the PoMo crowd. Bunch of colon-polyp-slurping idiots. And they obviously haven't learned jack shit in two decades. I'd like to see the lady quoted above banished to some island with a cohort of like-minded thinkers. I want them to form a new society based on their twisted principles. I want to see what their "engineers" are capable of producing with their unmath—how sturdy their homes are, how fuel-efficient their cars are, how well they're battling against hunger, disease, and other slings and arrows. I suspect their lives truly would be nasty, brutish, and short.
Stupid is as stupid does. The inherent hypocrisy and racism of the left are beyond disgusting. Wake up, sheeple!
ReplyDeleteIn fairness, the article twists the words of the "2 plus 2 equals 4" prof. She is not saying that this incontravertible statement reeks of "white supremacy patriarchy," she is saying that those who try to deny systemic issues in the field of mathematics by arguing about how math itself is pure are missing the point.
ReplyDeleteI am not arguing for or against her point here (although I do think her lack of clarity makes her easy prey to shots like this). I just think that if you want to criticize someone, you should criticize what they are actually trying to say and not a meme-ified straw man.
The article gives an example of the "colonization" that Laurie Rubel is apparently talking about. Some unnamed "former educator" says the following:
ReplyDelete"By now it is well known, for example, that other cultures were using the theorem we call Pythagorean, yet we still refer to it with this name. This is colonization and erasure."
So the colonization is happening at the level of naming conventions? That's a stupid argument. The fact that it's called the "Pythagorean Theorem" is an accident of history, not an act of oppression. Koreans say "삼각형"; English- and French-speakers write "triangle." Are we being oppressive simply by speaking our own languages? I don't care what some other culture calls the Pythagorean Theorem, but I do expect American kids to be taught that nomenclature. It's nothing to apologize for. (I'm not addressing my thoughts to/at you, to be clear; I'm addressing Rubel and her PC ilk.)
I've seen plenty of documentaries talking about how certain important math concepts—like "zero" as both a discrete quantity and a placeholder—came from outside the West but got incorporated into the ever-growing corpus of Western mathematical knowledge. Non-Western cultures have long been given credit for ideas that filtered into the West, and not just in the field of math.
I would need to see evidence of much more than Western naming conventions before I concede that the field of mathematics is somehow tainted or suffused with colonialism and other bigotries. For Rubel to attack math's supposed oppressiveness by citing the "trope" of 2+2=4 is silly at best. 2+2 does equal 4, no matter the culture. The apodictic concept is pan-cultural; some would argue it's inscribed in the nature of our cosmos.
Rubel is tying apodictic concepts in with decidedly non-apodictic, PC notions of racism, oppression, etc. She tweets, "I'd rather think on nurturing people & protecting the planet (with math in service of those goals)." So in her mental hierarchy, math is less important than her agenda. There's definitely a connection, here, between PC thinking and 2+2=5. If your ideology is more important than apodictic truth, I'd argue, then you're the oppressive one. All in all, I don't think the article misread Rubel. If anything, I want to see her supposed evidence of math's "white supremacy and patriarchy." At a guess, her evidence will be no different from that of any other yahoo who screams that math is racist.
At times like this, I'd normally say I'm happy to be in Korea, away from the nonsense, but PC thinking has infected Korean academe for years. There's no escape.