A well-respected colleague, Dr. Rochelle Gutiérrez, whose work has been influential on my own thinking and in the field of math education more generally has recently come under attack in the media. This stems from a group called Campus Reform, a conservative organization that sees itself as fighting against liberal bias in higher education. Their story was then picked up by larger organizations, including this piece on Fox News.
Because I run in math ed circles, I have seen a fair amount of discussion of this article. Some of the comments seem (to me) to misunderstand Dr. Gutiérrez's work and educational scholarship focused on equity, privilege, and oppression more generally. I'm not here to speak for her, though. She has an impressive academic record and her scholarship speaks for itself—I invite you to read some of her writing.
Instead, I do want to explain how I think about some of the ways that privilege (including White privilege) and oppression relate to mathematics education. I hope this can provide an accessible entry point into a conversation about these issues that goes beyond an article that fails to do justice to Dr. Gutiérrez's work (but again, I strongly encourage you to read her work).
Academic Language
This whole section is how I (and many scholars) think about issues of privilege and oppression, and racism in particular. The next major section (What Does this Have to Do with Math?) is focused on how this relates to math education.
A lot of scholarship in education and related fields uses everyday terms with slightly different meanings. This can be nice because it makes our scholarship more readable and accessible, but it can also be problematic because it can lead to misunderstanding.
Racism vs. Bias/Prejudice
One of the clearest places I see this is with the term "racism." For me (and other scholars I read) racism is a system that has been developed and reinforced over hundreds of years. I'm going to start by giving some examples of things that I would argue are not racist.
Let's consider the example of "reverse racism." What if a Black person said "I hate White people." Isn't that racism? (or reverse racism?) I would say no, and to be honest I don't think I can explain it much better than the comedian Aamer Rahman:
I don't consider the phrase "I hate White people" or "White people can't dance" to be racist because these phrases not part of a larger system of oppression (the kind of system Rahman describes in the clip). "I hate White people" is an individual act of bias or prejudice, but it's not racist. Similarly, the statement "I hate Black people" isn't, in and of itself, racist to me—what makes it racist is the fact that it exists in, reinforces, and resonates with the broader system of oppression that Rahman describes in the clip: the long term exploitation of resources, privileging White forms of beauty, the historical legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws that concentrated wealth in the hands of Whites, governmental policies that limited access to housing and mortgages, etc.
"I hate White people" simply cannot reinforce or resonate with a system of oppression, because there has not been systemic oppression of Whites.
This definition of racism bothers some people, because they already know what the words "racist" and "racism" mean to them. So it might be better to use the term systemic racism to talk about the system of racism that Rahman describes in the clip and individual racism to describe individual acts of bias or prejudice. Honestly, I don't care a lot about the particular terms used, but I do care about the concept of a system of oppression and that this this system of oppression has been built and reinforced for hundreds of years.
White Privilege
White privilege is the other side of systemic racism. It's all the (often hidden) advantages that White people have that non-Whites don't have. Many of these advantages are really just things that any human being should have, so they don't always feel like privileges to White people because they get used to thinking they're just normal (and ideally most of them would be normal for all people).
I think this video gives a really nice overview of some aspects of the system of oppression and privilege that have operated in our country and how they connect to wealth and educational opportunities:
One of the most powerful forms of White privilege is the fact that you can mostly live your life not thinking about the privileges you had and how they have come at the expense of non-Whites. Like the person in the video, you might have worked hard your whole life to earn what you have and you may not be racist, but "it's just the way things are." You didn't make your neighborhood or school predominantly White and you certainly can't change it alone.
Poverty and Racism
White people can be oppressed in other ways. You can be White and poor and therefore extremely disadvantaged and oppressed. But that doesn't erase your White privilege... it may change how it operates and the extent to which you are able to take advantage of it, but it does not erase it. You can be privileged in some ways (even if you don't feel privileged because you have so many other unfair hardships) while still being oppressed in other ways.
By virtually every metric Black Americans have it worse than White Americans, even after we adjust for people's level of poverty/wealth. We can look at how long criminal sentences are for similar crimes, the rates at which people are charged for loans (as mentioned in the video), educational opportunities (again see the video), health outcomes and life expectancy, representation in the media, etc.
What Does this Have to Do with Math?
So what do oppression and White privilege have to do with mathematics?
Whose Math History Do We Learn and Whose Math Do We Value?
Math in school doesn't address history that much. When it does it tends to over-emphasize the contributions of Europeans and the Greeks. Moreover, most of the academic content we learn in school over-emphasizes Europeans and Whites, so we have to explicitly include a focus on how a broad range of peoples have made important mathematical discoveries and contributions. For example, we can either attribute the Pythagorean Theorem to Pythagoras (a Greek) or we can talk about the evidence that numerous societies likely knew about this theorem and used it prior to Pythagoras. As another example, many of the future teachers I work with are unaware, for instance, that algebra is an Islamic word and is derived from the work of Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī until they learn it in my course or one of their college level courses.
There's also the question of whose math we value in the classroom. Some countries teach different algorithms for adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing numbers, but in many U.S. schools we teach as though there is one universal approach to doing mathematics. This can be particularly problematic for immigrant children or children with immigrant parents.
One way to see this is to ask students to draw a mathematician and see what they draw.
This is an example of privilege/oppression. As a White person I had the privilege of seeing people of my own race well represented in the math books I read. Also, almost all of my math teachers were of my own race. Imagine what it must feel like going through life and rarely seeing the contributions of people who look like you being highlighted or focused on.
Who Gets Labeled as "High"?
Many, many schools in the U.S. track students into "high" and "low" groups. This is, perhaps, especially common in math. It can start as early as elementary school when kids are put into groups within the same classroom, identified for acceleration (e.g., moving to another grade for math), or provided with enrichment opportunities. In middle and high school it is usually even more formally systematized in that different students take different courses. This is done with the idea that students will receive instruction better suited to their "level." However, the research on this is pretty clear: The gaps between "low" and "high" groups gets bigger, and there are huge inequities in which races (and socioeconomic groups) are labeled as "high" vs. "low". Basically, White and Asian students are far more likely to be labeled as "high" and since they then receive more advanced instruction they excel farther in mathematics. This message doesn't just come through in formal placements, Danny Martin has written about how Black learners have received the message from teachers and administrators that math is not for them.
This labeling of "high" and "low" kids is unfortunate because it primarily relies on an overly-narrow definition of mathematical smartness and learning. If you limit math to memorizing the teacher's way of doing things and quickly calculating the answer then, yes, some kids will be faster than others. However, if you expand math to include explaining your thinking, representing mathematical ideas visually, developing multiple strategies, justifying your work, and making connections between important ideas (you know, all the things mathematicians actually do), then it's much less common for one child to excel in all of these areas. In fact, often the child who is good at the quick/memorization version of math will struggle in some of these other areas. And we have some really great classroom-tested and research-based methods for teaching that kind of mathematics to mixed groups of kids.
The racial disparities in who is labeled as "high" and "low" is especially problematic since mathematics is a gatekeeper discipline for entry to college and many high paying and status careers.
Investing in Education
As seen in the Adam Ruins Everything video, we invest differently in the education of Black and White students in the U.S. Black children are far more likely to attend schools with less experienced and qualified teachers, lower funding per pupil, and less opportunities for advanced coursework (like A.P. courses). This results in what Dan Battey and Luis Leyva call a significant investment in Whiteness—we (as a society) invest more in the mathematical education of White students. Gloria Ladson-Billings has referred to this as the education debt and other scholars highlight this as an opportunity gap between White and Asian students and Black and Latinx students.
The "Achievement Gap"
The mention of opportunity gap brings up another important point. We often talk in education about how Black and Brown children are coming up short—this is generally described as the achievement gap because Black and Brown children are not achieving at the same level as White and Asian students. The fact that White students often under-achieve compared to Asian students is not emphasized to the same degree, so it primarily frames Black and Brown students as coming up short. This is why so many scholars have begun to talk about the opportunity gap, educational debt, and the investments in Whiteness mentioned above. Because these gaps are the result of how we fail to support all children, not failures of the children themselves.
But more broadly, a lot of research has focused on this issue and implicit in much of this research is the idea that White is the norm and other groups should be analyzed for why they do not match up to that norm. Danny Martin has been particularly critical of this trend and has also pointed out that there are very few examples of research that focus on successful Black students. In response he has called for, and conducted his own research on, successful African American students in mathematics, how they navigate that space, and how many learner's African American identity strengthened their commitment to education.
Mathematics as Operating in Whiteness
I have not read Dr. Gutiérrez's most recent chapter, so when she is quoted as saying "Mathematics itself operates as Whiteness" I don't know exactly what she means. But to me, that phrase (again without the context of her chapter) is the culmination of what I have discussed above (and many other nuances and details I didn't get into). Over time mathematics has come to be associated with Whiteness. This occurs through the little history we teach about its development, the examples of mathematicians children see in their lives, the decisions we make about who will get placed into advanced math, and the opportunities we give to our students through spending for schools, qualified teachers, and advanced coursework. As long as mathematics occupies this position in our society and as long as our society is set up to reinforce this view of mathematics, we are going to have the problems discussed above. So teachers (and everyone else) need to learn to unpack the hidden ways in which mathematics and Whiteness have been wrapped up with each other and work to challenge this both within the classroom and outside of the classroom, because many of these structures extend beyond the classroom walls.
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