A professor who thinks math is racist also “thinks that rocks are alive and apparently should have the same rights as humans,” notes a law professor at George Mason University.
As the “math-is-racist” professor put it to the annual meeting of a major math education conference:
Indigenous knowledges recognize that we are part of a system of intelligent and sentient beings, also referred to as persons, with interconnected spirits, including rocks and bodies of water. Plants, for example, have lived on this planet for millions of years before humans. In that sense, plants are our older brothers/sisters and have developed ways of efficiently using space, relating with other living beings, and sustaining life not just for themselves but for others, often with few resources at any given moment…They have much to teach us; and we may have something to teach them. Breaking with a human/non-human binary is consistent with queer theory, which recognizes the violence that is justified when some are viewed to be more human than others….
Our choice to destroy the planet to serve our immediate/capitalistic/technology needs is a form of settler colonialism that perpetuates violence. That is, because a Western worldview does not consider plants, animals, and rocks as living beings of equal value with the same rights to this universe as humans, the result is that plants, animals and rocks suffer the same treatment as Indigenous peoples have endured throughout time. For example, like American Indians who were stripped of their lands and communities and forced to live in boarding schools, plants are yanked from their families and forced to assimilate into Western ways of doing things (e.g., to become suburban gardens). By respecting animals, plants, and even rocks as living beings, we can avoid some of the human/material binary that has plagued the sciences in the past.
This professor, Rochelle Gutierrez, claims that “mathematics” enjoys “unearned privilege” in our “society.” She also argues that math teachers should focus more on “political knowledge” (including promoting “creative insubordination”) and less on “content knowledge” and “pedagogical knowledge.”
She is an education professor at one of America’s better-ranked universities, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Sadly, Gutierrez is not the only education school professor who thinks math is racist. An education-school professor at Vanderbilt University devoted an entire lecture to the world’s largest math gathering that called math a “white” and “cisheteropatriarchal” space.
Luis Leyva, a professor of math education, delivered the lecture, titled “Undergraduate Mathematics Education as a White, Cisheteropatriarchal Space and Opportunities for Structural Disruption to Advance Queer of Color Justice.” It was given two weeks ago at the Joint Mathematics Meetings 2023, described as the “largest mathematics gathering in the world.”
Leyva’s writings “depict how Black, Latin*, and Asian QT [queer and transgender] students’ narratives of experience reflect forms of intersectionality, or instances of oppression and resistance,” according to the abstract of his lecture.
Grateful to be distinguished with the opportunity to deliver the Spectra (@LGBTMath) Lavender Lecture at the 2023 @JointMath Mtgs in Boston tomorrow. I will deliver a lecture based on my research interrogating undergraduate math education as a white, cisheteropatriarchal space. https://t.co/JiaTe0B8zs
— Luis Antonio Leyva (he/him/él) (@LuisLeyvaEdu) January 3, 2023
Leyva’s research followed the “educational experiences of 39 undergraduate queer and trans* (QT) students of color pursuing STEM majors across historically white and minority-serving universities in the United States,” according to the abstract. “I conclude by re-imagining undergraduate mathematics education with structural disruptions that advance justice for learners marginalized across intersections of race, gender, and sexuality,” it said.
Leyva also is affiliated with Vanderbilt’s Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies. His faculty biography says his work ”draws on critical race theory, women of color feminisms, and queer of color critique to conceptually and methodologically ground his scholarship, which centers historically marginalized voices in STEM higher education across intersections of race, gender, and sexuality.”
Leyva was named the LGBTQ+ Educator of the Year in 2022 by Out to Innovate, a professional organization for LGBTQ+ people in STEM.
But normal people find his lecture bizarre. Levya’s “abstract reads like an over-the-top caricature, another Sokal hoax,” says Aryeh Kontorovich, a professor of computer science at Ben-Gurion University. “It is my opinion as a computer scientist/mathematician and instructor with over 14 years of experience that politics and social justice have no place in math pedagogy. We can never all agree on what is just, while we can (hopefully) agree on what is mathematically correct, so math education should focus exclusively on the latter.”
