Rochelle Gutierrez is one of my personal academic rock stars. Since I saw her close out Shadowcon16 I’ve held her work up as what I needed to learn more about, and what I was so glad that people were doing. While I haven’t had time to read as much as I’d like, listening to that talk, and her Global Math talk was very powerful. Both challenged me to do more for the student populations that I serve, and comforted by the fact that researchers in the field are out doing work to challenge people like me.
Not everyone appreciates challenges, however. In a recent work, Gutierrez drew a number of connections between math and whiteness, which sparked the ire of a number of people. In response, critics led a tiki-torch parade across all media platforms with Fox News itself sparking the rally. Their main argument, it seems, is that whiteness should not be challenged.
While I don’t know the full detail of the argument, I want to make it clear that whatever side Rochelle Gutierrez is on, will be the side I am on. The idea that someone can pick apart a scholars work because it doesn’t match with your beliefs is an assault on all scientific disciplines. Without science, we as a people lack a firm way to connect the problems that plague us to solutions we would need to create. The clearest example I can think of, was the achievement gap, which has been the goal of our country since the at least the 90s. It has made less and less sense to me since the phrase became popular, but when I began reading the articles around this controversy, I made the connection between the gap, and this mathematical trend towards whiteness pretty early. “Why should the non-white people’s goal be do what the white people are doing? What if they should do something else?” But I thought my ideas were on the fringe. Listening to Rochelle’s work made clear that there was a connection, and there was a way to utilize the truth in that connection between Whiteness and Math to improve outcomes for students. Making these kinds of connections are important to making progress with math, or with science, or to make a more perfect union. The right for people to make connections, create knowledge, and push their field further is something that shouldn’t be threatened.
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So I originally sat down to write a post about this last week. The draft was about as long as this, actually. But it sat in my drafts folder next to posts about Charlottesville, Betsy Devos, and other things that haven’t gotten posted. When I come around to edit these kinds of posts at some point I let life’s business and distractions get in the way from my pushing the send button until it never gets pushed at all. It happened so often that I decided to give a talk about it at TMC, not as an expert, but as someone trying to figure out the answer. In this case, I am hitting send. In part because I have time, and because of this poem, and the fear that things like open expression, and anyone pushing the send button, is at stake if this kind of intimidation is allowed to go unchecked.
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