There Is No Such Thing as “White” Math
bariweiss.substack.com
bariweiss.substack.com
> White supremacy culture infiltrates math classrooms in everyday teacher actions.
This is a very loaded intro which makes it impossible to disagree with anything that follows. It may be true, I don't know...because there was zero supporting info. All we are told is that white supremacy is everywhere and unless you abide by the author's instructions, you're a racist.
It's not a great starting point to create allies.
Intertwine X with a perceived virtue Y. Then deflect any rebuttal of X by claiming you’re an enemy of Y.
Was that the purpose of the document?
How are you saying anything different? The premise is that teachers perpetuate systems of white supremacy implicitly in the way they teach, and, as you say, the document seeks to provide means of addressing this.
These cross-cultural efforts pretty much fall under the umbrella category of "creating allies". What specifically do you take issue with?
EDIT Ok OP has edited their comment. I will leave mine with the original text.
Trimmed because I thought it didn't add anything really and wasn't very articulate. Basically - not every document needs to justify its existence from first principles. "How to fix X" doesn't need to convince you that X is in fact a problem you have, if it's aimed at people who already think that.
> Basically - not every document needs to justify its existence from first principles
That doesn't hold when your document is presupposed on there being an issue that most practitioners are ignorant to. "How to fit X" is very different from "People who don’t fit X are harmful to society". The latter absolutely needs to justify a number of things.
I don't thing this is true. If for no other reasons than pedagogical, it can make sense to separate these things. I do agree there probably needs to be at least one other document, but don't know the context the authors presented this one, it was just given as a link.
The issue is that no amount of inclusivity is going to result in perfectly equitable, racially balanced outcomes in mathematics. The only way to reach those outcomes is to deconstruct mathematics itself so that the factors inherent in it that result in disparate outcomes across groups are removed.
This might take the form of removing aspects like "correctness" and "proofs" and formal notation and so forth; it is up to us as a society to determine what we value more. Personally, as someone who will probably end up having to live under a bridge one day due to posting edgy comments online, I hope that we value correctness, at least in civil engineering fields. Otherwise, that bridge may fall on me...
I understand that she might find it infuriating, because 2/3 of it consists of repeated worksheet pages about planning, executing and critiquing improvements in math education.
The other 1/3 of it, however, is largely discussion of bad math teaching, framed as racist math teaching. Most of it simply points out that bad math teaching is frequently authoritarian math teaching.
I find the framing grating and the discussion of pedagogy insufficient -- I would prefer about ten times as much -- but this is a calendrical worksheet book, not a text.
I suspect Weiss [edit: Klainerman] did not read the document he is criticizing, or didn't understand it.
I think the framing you mention is part of a broader effort to understand that in the U.S., authoritarianism is, overwhelmingly, racism. If you can think of a large, structured system in the U.S., you can usually think of ways that it (for some reason...) has worse outcomes for non-white people.
The outrage is really about mandated bad teaching environments. There are also very bad side effects for minorities, but calling it racist, when the culture is overall about domination, is missing the target.
"As awful as this is, the fact that it's funded by The Gates Foundation makes it even worse. So when Bill isn't trying to save the world from Climate Change or drive the world batshit crazy about Covid he's spending his money on racist initiatives..."
All they need to validate their misguided outrage without having to read a damn article. Wish Weiss would start a series about lazy pseudo-intellectualism feeding all this tribalism.
None of these statements are equal:
> Statement A: "Children of certain minorities perform more poorly at math."
This is a (sad) fact.
> Statement B: "Math instruction is racist."
Could be true. If true, we can agree it's undesirable. The Gates foundation is tossing some money around based on this idea.
> Statement C: "Math is racist."
This is absurd clickbait that nobody actually believes. The writer is intentionally confusing statement B and C because clickbait.
That said, I'm sure there are people here that still don't buy statement B, so for the purposes of argument let's tweak it a bit: "Math instruction is sexist".
There was a study of elementary school children that showed that girls taught by women perform more poorly in math than girls taught by men. With boys, the gender of the teacher didn't matter nearly as much. The researches speculated that women teachers might be projecting their own insecurities about math to the women in the class, essentially giving the girls permission to be bad at math just because they are girls.
Putting aside the other wider socioeconomic factors, it's not hard to imagine a similar phenomenon happening among children of color, and if a billionaire wants to spend his money to try to find solutions to these problems, we should let him.
And if it was the opposite, the researchers would have speculated that it was because the way we teach math is sexist. No matter what, we always arrive at the same conclusions - sexism and white supremacy. Just like with wars, myriads of different reasons and excuses, but always the same outcome.
Bad teaching is just bad teaching. I live in a racially homogeneous country where we have virtually no minorities and we have similar problems as well.
The problem here is that this question is impossible to answer rigorously without treading into areas that are career suicide.
It is extremely clear that mathematical ability is directly correlated to general intelligence. Low general intelligence is going to make it harder for you to be really good at math; higher general intelligence is going to make it more possible.
Instruction factors into this, but if we want to actually determine the impact of instruction, we need to have a controlled experiment - and this means necessarily controlling for intelligence, and then evaluating to determine if the supposed racist bias is as prevalent and as worrisome as commentators like yourself allege.
IQ is the closest measure of general intelligence we have, and the science of psychometrics has been improving steadily over the past hundred years to be less racially biased and more independent of background and prior knowledge. However, IQ remains highly problematic, because any demographic analysis of IQ is going to reveal trends that match exactly the kinds of outcomes we see in math achievement to a tee. This has been consistent for as long as we have been measuring, and does not show any promise of disappearing any time soon.
What do you do with this? Fundamentally, you have a choice: deny the IQ numbers, deny the science behind IQ research itself, continue to claim that IQ measurement itself is racist despite decades of genuine attempts to remove culture as a factor, or lastly - actually accept that the numbers are what they say they are, and stop pretending otherwise.
In general, the world of academia has chosen the first option: denying the validity of the demographic information entirely, and doing everything possible to make it difficult to collect this information, study it, draw conclusions from it, or cite it in anything else. Trying to use it to form any kind of policy decision is impossible.
Only the last option is honest, and only honesty can actually result in anything approaching a productive way of addressing issues in society. If you want to remove racial bias from instruction, first, it is incumbent upon you to prove that it is present; this in turn stems from honesty about what we should actually expect out of everyone.
I don't view such worldviews as racist, just pseudointellectualism.
Phrenology, and no, it's not at all the same. Phrenologists believed that you could determine aspects of a person's propensity towards behavior by measuring their head; psychometricians believe we can determine how intelligent someone is by using an intelligence test. If you really think these two things are at all comparable, it's hard to believe you're posting in good faith.
Truly, you're doing yourself a disservice, and you're showing ignorance and disrespect toward the many social scientists, psychologists, and statisticians who have researched psychometrics and the study of general intelligence for over a century.
> There are many ways to teach children, and children are different. No need to give up or never try due to some linear stats.
Where is this implied in what I posted? I absolutely believe in making sure that people have access to great mathematics education; further, I don't think we should even use aggregate statistics to in any way limit the opportunities we extend to every member of society to climb that ladder if it is their calling.
The problem is that there are people who expect that the constituency of mathematicians is going to be a 1:1 representative sample of the population. In fact, that's probably still "too white" for many, since that would result in 60%+ white people.
In reality, the group is, will, and will always be composed of those who are able to ascend to a level of mathematical greatness that you and I and most other folks wouldn't even dream of. Any attempt to change that forcibly along the lines of racial equity is going to result in something that will make Maoist killings of intellectuals look positively honest and forthright in comparison.
I sincerely don’t care if your average person can’t master calculus but I do care that people can’t split a check and work out the gratuity in their head.
I'm never going to agree that the area of a square has an "opinion" about your identity or validates my "whiteness", but I fully recognize that ML/AI results can be poisoned by "problematic" training data and that an elementary school word problem can be confusing or hurtful if tacit dominant culture knowledge is assumed.
Math doesn't.
Teachers and systems of pedagogy[0], however, can even if the subject matter does not.
[0] the former literally, and both metaphorically in the sense of “provide you different value in ways which are a function, in part, of”.
This is the most racist document I have ever read. "The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false" is on p. 65.
That’s a problem with grammar and language; not math.
The agenda behind the pamphlet is obvious. I liked this gem from the page at issue:
>Schooling as we know it began during the industrial revolution, when precision and accuracy were highly valued. What are the myriad ways we can conceptualize mathematics in today’s world and beyond?
These thing WERE highly valued? They are no longer? And weren’t they valued BEFORE the industrial revolution? Indeed, was not the Industrial Revolution possible in the first place due to the high value put on precision and accuracy?
As for the 'highly valued' bit; one could argue that mathematics built for problem solving creative issues (including in computer programming) is now valued more than it was then. That could lead to different curriculum than before.
You don't land a rocket on Mars by valuing anything other than precision and accuracy.
The laws of the universe just don't care about anything else.
I don't think I can rephrase it better than the document already states:
> And teaching math isn't just about solving specific problems. It's about helping students understand the deeper mathematical concepts so that they can apply them throughout their lives. Students can arrive at the right answer without grasping the bigger concept; or they can have an “aha” moment when they see why they got an answer wrong. Sometimes a wrong answer sheds more light than a right answer.
It is hugely useful to be able to interrogate misleading paths to seemingly correct but ultimately incorrect answers. Half of standardized test answers seem to be written to intentionally capture such missteps.
> Of course, most math problems have correct answers, but sometimes there can be more than one way to interpret a problem, especially word problems, leading to more than one possible right answer.
> And teaching math isn't just about solving specific problems. It's about helping students understand the deeper mathematical concepts so that they can apply them throughout their lives. Students can arrive at the right answer without grasping the bigger concept; or they can have an “aha” moment when they see why they got an answer wrong. Sometimes a wrong answer sheds more light than a right answer.
It seems like a toolkit for identifying how seemingly innocuous ideas could support existing power structures in our society. Why should that be shunned?
"Classrooms are often microcosms of the world around us and reinforce dominant (or white) ways of being."
> It seems like a toolkit for identifying how seemingly innocuous ideas could support existing power structures in our society. Why should that be shunned?
It lacks intellectual rigor and is unfalsifiable, yet the burden of proof rests on the accused. Perhaps the tools we use to teach math are suboptimal, but to assert that they are "racist" or "white" (in a harmful sense) is an extraordinary claim that needs extraordinary evidence.
It should be possible to experimentally demonstrate that certain teaching methods improve the outcomes towards racial equity, then give recommendations based on those results. If this isn't possible, how could we achieve racial equity by making all these assertions, then requiring teachers to reflect upon them? Clearly, if the teachers are biased by white supremacy, all of their conclusions must be biased as well.
The entire pamphlet is 100% crazy. I can't imagine how anyone could read this charitably, it's quite obviously the work of people who have totally lost their minds. The entire concept of labelling ordinary aspects of any imaginable education system as "white" is fundamentally racist.
It talks about not being either/or in regards to succeeding, not dismissing students because they don't have a good grasp of mathematical language, not being super harsh about sticking to the curriculum. This just sounds like Waldorf or Montessori school stuff.
It almost feels targeted: occupy the mathematicians' time with the modest specifics to divert their attention away from the, err, praxis in the framing.
Under a literal or charitable reading, it's not a problem. It's making the point that systemic racism can pop up in a number of places on a map of the educational landscape. That's fine. It's true. It's not saying that those places themselves inherently constitute white supremacy culture.
However, this all hinges entirely on the reading being charitable or at the very least literal -- and if there's one life lesson that my interactions with others keep hammering home, it's that people are not generally literal or charitable. People are fuzzy association machines. Literal meanings can sometimes protect you in a court of law or court of academics. Charitability can protect you among friends. Absent those two narrow, tenuous exceptions, that paper gives wokescolds permission to label any of a dozen core aspects of teaching as "white supremacy culture," insofar as school administration allows it to do so, which by my estimation they absolutely will.
I sincerely hope this fear is misplaced.
I personally am unbothered because this is a document for curriculum designers with real explanations of their arguments, and I doubt that it will encourage a culture-wide opposition to, for example, "right answers." I'm not sure how someone, meaning to avoid racism, would problematically de-emphasize right answers. To my mind, the only likely negative result would be ineffectual scolding. But I'm open to being proven wrong.
(Please note that one or two examples of teachers being unjustly fired is not terrible persuasive, in the same way as one or two marijuana-related deaths is not evidence that marijuana is a society-wide epidemic.)
Example from my life: We mentor a black girl in high school physics. The Physics teacher misinterpreted her age assuming she was a 3rd or 4th year (which is a common culturual/racial gap, not intentional but structural!) when she is a freshman. The teacher in consequence also misintepreted where she 'should' be at in her ability to manage school life, homework, comprehension etc.
After he learned his mistake he reframed his perception of the students efforts at learning, and was able to teach her. She successfully passed that class trying again after narrowly failing the first time.
The section on showing your work is about how students can show their process in multiple ways. It could be a discussion or a video or a drawing instead of a series of equations. This section emphasizes how students may have a different way of solving a problem than they were taught and that is ok and shouldn't be punished.
In short, the few sections of the mathematics report endorsed by the Gates foundation seem to cover basic pedagogy with an eye towards diverse ways of thinking, communicating, and learning. All of this should be standard to any educator. I fail to see the fire for which the author is ringing alarm bells.
Who would disagree with this? This has nothing to do with race and everything to do with good teaching. And teachers who fail to do this are bad teachers, not racists.
What is still perplexing to some people, is how race gets tied up into this argument. I absolutely believe that the US education system fails many, many students and that this disproportionately falls on minorities and students of color. But this almost always falls back to manifestations of larger socioeconomic structures, and not the way that material is taught. Asian students perform far better in math than white students. Do Asians thrive under systems of white supremacy more than caucasians?
Every field of human endeavor is a social construct. In the best case scenario, we are able to agree on some basic set of facts which are considered to be true regardless of the people observing them. But like the world of quantum physics, sometimes things shift in subtle ways simply because of who is observing them. No, I'm not saying 2 + 2 doesn't always equal 4. But the significance or "use case" for acquiring or utilizing that bit of knowledge is subjective, as are the methods used to convey that knowledge…which is where things get tricky.
Into High School, this got me the opportunity to tutor some of my friend's little brothers in math (who happened to be African American). I was confident in my math skills, and the family would pay me (hurrah, high-school $$$) so I accepted the offer. I can't say that I recall anything different going on, or any particular "racial" bits that I had to watch out for.
This was just a kid who couldn't grasp Multiplication, Perimeters, and other basic Geometry and was failing at it. With a few weeks of tutoring, we got past his mental block and apparently he got an A in the class soon after I helped him. The only bit of advice I can give here is... say "I don't know" and be 100% honest with the student. "I don't know, but give me your textbook. Let me see if I can figure it out first". By showing him how I learned from the textbook, it seemed like the kid picked up and learned how to teach himself.
In fact: "I don't know" was probably the most important thing I ever showed him. Too many students think that Math-wizards know everything without study. But here I am, a straight-A (in Math) student who will proudly say "I don't know" and study 1-on-1 with the kid. This knowledge didn't come for free: I got it from hard work, and if there's lack of practice over the years (a long time since I did 3rd grade or 4th grade math), I get rusty and need to re-study up to get back into the groove.
I don't think he needed more than ~4 tutoring sessions from me. He really started learning on his own after that.
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Perhaps because this African American was literally in my same neighborhood, same high school (well, at least his older brother was), and similar academic culture. But... I didn't see much difference with that.
Now I admit that one-on-one tutoring is very different than classroom-teaching. Classroom teaching is very dreadful: a "competitive Classroom" necessarily makes winners-and-losers, and the losers often feel like its hopeless to make any progress what so ever.
I think that's the real issue with teaching in America: the "winners" and "losers" that is all too often in a competitive classroom environment. And in my experience, those academic losers do tend to be people of color.
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One-on-one instruction completely removes that competitive ladder from the situation however. But that's not really scalable in general. We have classrooms so that one teacher can teach 30 students. If we could actually afford 1-teacher per student, then it isn't a school, its a tutoring session.
I dunno, that's my little bit of experience on this subject. As far as I can tell: its the middle-class / upper-class who can largely afford private tutoring sessions (removing their children from the unhelpful, "competitive" classroom environments).
I may have gotten "A" in my Math subjects. But I got Cs in Chemistry and Biology, and Ds and Fs in English and History. "Competitive" classrooms are incredibly damaging to your psyche: you feel useless in a subject as others in your class pull ahead, and it becomes hopeless to catch up. That's what I learned from my own high school experience.
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Ironically, it felt like College was less competitive for me, and more about the joy of exploring pure academics. There was a competitive element due to grading on a curve, but I was really able to flourish in College when I stopped caring about comparing myself to others. I still got my Cs in various subjects (but never lower than that). I think I finally figured out the proper environment that worked for my psyche by then.
What I found was a PDF that sought to aid teachers in their teaching of mathematics and encourage their students to think of math not as a boring sequence of steps but as the nuanced field it actually is.
According to the article: The program argues that “white supremacy culture shows up in the classroom when the focus is on getting the ‘right’ answer” or when students are required to show their work, while stipulating that the very “concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false”. The main goal of the program is “to dismantle racism in mathematics instruction” with the expressly political aim of engaging “the sociopolitical turn in all aspects of education, including mathematics.”
But the actual PDF says this.
On getting the right answer:
The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so. Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.
Verbal Example: Come up with at least two answers that might solve this problem. • Classroom Activity: Challenge standardized test questions by getting the “right” answer, but justify other answers by unpacking the assumptions that are made in the problem. • Classroom Activity: Deconstructed Multiple Choice - given a set of multiple choice answers, students discuss why these answers may have been included (can also be used to highlight common mistakes). • Professional Development: Study the purpose of math education, and re-envision it. Schooling as we know it began during the industrial revolution, when precision and accuracy were highly valued. What are the myriad ways we can conceptualize mathematics in today’s world and beyond?
On showing your work (page 54):
Math teachers ask students to show work so that teachers know what students are thinking, but that can center the teacher’s need to understand rather than student learning. Teachers should seek to understand individual student perspectives and focus on students showing their work in ways that help students learn how to process information.
• Verbal Example: If you were working with a fellow mathematician who was absent this day, what might you tell them to help them learn it? • Classroom Activity: Number talks, where students have to engage with mental mathematics not limited to computations. • Professional Development: As a department, solve complex problems without writing and share with each other about that process.
I look at the proposed activities and I wish my teachers had the training to implement them. As one of the poor people who made it out thanks to math, I had to watch my classmates, many of them white, fall behind and grow disinterested because math was long work books and time trials (The class would regularly race to finish a hundred inane math problems. I and another student, latino, were the only ones to bother. He stopped competing when I kept winning. This whole process was very stupid.)
The PDF does not at all encourage making math easier. It would make math harder. It suggests teaching Linear Algebra (something I didn't learn until after undergrad) before precalculus and teaching about unsolvable problems (it boggles my mind how no one taught me about P vs NP problems) early. Teamwork is something I think is lacking from mathematics in general.
White supremacy hurts everyone, not just the black and white kids left behind by it. It also seems to poison the minds of great people, like this professor, into thinking uncritically about ways to improve the capabilities of others. A teacher's job isn't to find good students but to make them. I hope the author takes another look.
https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/is-it-racist-to-expect-...?