Friday, May 19, 2017

U. of Hawaii Math Prof: White Men Should Quit Their Jobs So Non-White-Men Can Have Them

   Yeah, you can have my job when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. 
    Almost worse than her idiotic post are the idiotic comments. Here's one!:
We need to decouple success in mathematics from IQ. IQ is a social construct that cishet white men devised that defines “intelligence” on the basis of culture. Sadly, there is a direct correlation between high IQ and “earning” a PhD in a STEM discipline, which is all too reflective of how white cishet men have designed disciplinary concepts to reinforce their own power structures.
It is fundamentally unfair and marginalizing for IQ tests and mathematics curriculum to be designed around the same white supremacist, cisheteronormative standards, thus marginalizing women of color. What we need isn’t just “fair hiring;” we need a radical reconceptualization of mathematics in a decolonizing framework.
Our friends in the fine arts lead the way here. A century ago, white male composers like Beethoven and Mozart were considered mastered, while the authentic cultural expression of nonwhite peoples was denigrated using words I won’t repeat here. The advances of critical theory have helped guide musicians into recognizing that the music of the Bantu people is just as worthy of learning and study as that of any baroque composer…so should we not follow the same lead? Is not our problem is that we have allowed white cishet men (nearly all of whom had utterly disgusting views about race and gender) to define “mathematics,” “logic” and “proof” for us? We should recognize that there are many kinds of math, many kinds of logic, and many kinds of proof, and assemble a new concept of math from the mosaic of cultural expression that humanity affords.It’s time for a new scientific revolution, if you ask me…this one led by the folks shut out of the last one.
That could be Poe-try...but I kinda don't think so... Which means Poe's law holds up...but we'll never really know whether that's for real.

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