Published Paper On “Observing Whiteness in Introductory Physics” Is Everything You’d Expect
Published in Physical Review Physical Education Research, affiliated with the American Physical Society, the authors “synthesize literature from Critical Whiteness Studies and Critical Race Theory to articulate analytic markers for whiteness, and use the markers to identify and analyze whiteness as it shows up in an introductory physics classroom interaction.”
History is replete with many dreadful scientific theories that have been supported by “research”. Phrenology, the existence of canals on Mars, the Earth-centered universe, and gold-from-lead are just some of the numerous examples of mankind trying to convince itself that fiction is fact.
There has been a recent entry to this collection of infamous scientific speculations: “Observing whiteness in introductory physics: A case study”, which has just been published in Physical Review Physical Education Research (PRPER). The publication is affiliated with the American Physical Society and is “a fully open access journal that is sponsored jointly by American Physical Society, the American Association of Physics Teachers, the APS Forum on Education, and the APS Group on Physics Education Research.”
The first clue that this supposedly scholarly paper is a hot mess of distorted fact and opinion-presented-as evidence comes as the authors identify their genders in the heading section. Dr. Amy D. Robertson (Research Assistant Professor of Physics, Seattle Pacific University) is the first author.
More interestingly is the second author, W. Tali Hairston (who is a PhD candidate in Education, based on his LinkedIn profile). His biography indicates he is the Director of Advocacy, Organizing, & Development at Seattle Presbytery, pursues equity-inclusive learning, and is the owner of Equitable Development LLC.
Therefore, the conclusion of the piece that more equity must be inserted into science education, the last area of educational instruction to be conquered by wokeness, must be questioned immediately. Clearly, it is in Hairston’s fiscal interest to offer consulting services to academia in the name of “equity”.
To provide additional insight into Hairston, here is a clip of him discussing “Racial Justice, Equity & Privilege as we follow Jesus”.
The paper’s introduction descends down into the next layer of academic hell. The authors “synthesize literature from Critical Whiteness Studies and Critical Race Theory to articulate analytic markers for whiteness, and use the markers to identify and analyze whiteness as it shows up in an introductory physics classroom interaction.”
In a nutshell, these two strive to prove that numbers, calculations, whiteboards, and debate are all markers for whiteness. How?
The “researchers” use a six-minute video clip of 3 students (two young women and one young man, all of whom are scientifically aware enough to know their real gender. They are collaboratively working through a Energy interaction diagram.
The data analysis section of this work is nothing more than a clip-by-clip review of the six minutes, and assigning motivation to each of the students based on the tenets of Critical Race Theory.
Here's what the paper actually does.
It describes a video.
Any time the group has a 'center' that the 3 students focus on, they claim this is 'whiteness' & 'white supremacy.'
So, because the students pay attention to a whiteboard diagram as a 'center,' this is 'whiteness.' 6/ pic.twitter.com/RRTKEAJZVi— David Decosimo (@DavidDecosimo) March 15, 2022
Any actual science in this paper is purely coincidental.
Yet, one section does deserve special mention. The smear whiteboards as tools of “white culture” has to be the most hilarious take on any subject I have ever read in what is allegedly a science-based publication.
In particular, whiteboards display written information for public consumption; they draw attention to themselves and in this case support the centering of an abstract representation and the person standing next to it, presenting. They collaborate with white organizational culture, where ideas and experiences gain value (become more central) when written down.
How did this travesty get by scientifically trained reviewers? It turns out that PRPER authors pay an article publication charge. Robertson and Hairston likely paid $2100 to share this chestnut with the world.
Of course, if your business is “equity”, then the article can be used as proof the equity services are needed. So, the $2100 must be viewed more as an investment…especially if you are going to try and gain more of a foothold into sciences that have been previously driven by numbers, hard data, and reason.
My son is currently a physics major. He chose that subject because he has a mind like Spock, paired with curiosity, enormous mathematical skills, a passion for research, and a willingness to study for hours. He and other “white” scholars deserve better than having their achievements smeared as a result of race-based privilege.
The social media mocking of “Observing whiteness in introductory physics” is more lucid, credible, and fact-based than anything written by Robertson and Hariston.
Physics education could be improved for EVERYONE, not by getting rid of whiteboards, but by getting rid of this kind of ridiculous Physics Education Research. Sad to learn of this waste of valuable resources. pic.twitter.com/l5dsWx1nQG
— Lawrence M. Krauss (@LKrauss1) March 12, 2022
Apparently the fact that 73% of young people are white and 72% of undergrad degrees go to white people is evidence that white supremacy is shaping degree granting. The American Physical Society is now publishing complete nonsense. https://t.co/moNnBDT39c
— Dorian Schuyler Abbot (@DorianAbbot) March 12, 2022
Get this lunacy out of the labs. This isn’t funny. It’s not cute. The grownups need to exclude such buffoonery in matters of national health & security.
This is simple straight up racism. It has no place in science. https://t.co/Wqz4031V4b
— Eric Weinstein (@EricRWeinstein) March 16, 2022
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Comments
As far back as the 1960s, we studied whiteness (as well as blackness) in Physics. Ever hear of a Crookes Radiometer?
Every February we can celebrate black body radiation!
Let’s tell these grifters: SHUT UP, ALREADY.
Yes, and can they please explain Gauss;s Law?????
The math here is simple: Two Wongs don’t make a white.
Satyendra Nath Bose must have been a white-dark skinned physicist
As a research chemist who has taught chemistry at a number of universities, I have seen a total of one black Ph.D. Chemist. I have asked countless black students if they would consider chemistry as a major extolling them how great a job it could be and every one of them has given me the same response. It is along the lines of “Are you nuts? To study chemistry you have to take tests where there are absolute answers like a certain number that is either right or wrong. That’s just too hard.” If black students refuse to study a subject because it is too hard, then is that the fault of the university? Should the university dumb down the subject matter to entice more to study it? I should think not.
That doesn’t mean they won’t. We’ll get the Tacoma Narrows Bridge equivalent chemists, physicists, engineers, and biologists, etc.
I weep for the horrors a woke chemist et al will bring down upon society.
Like, maybe, the next Covid “vaccine”?
Or the next “Covid”. That sword has two edges.
Well… yeah!
Well,…heck yeah!
As a Mechanical PE, I concern myself about the next generation of machine designers.
I don’t know that I want to drive that EV or fly in that plane .
Physics isn’t concerned on “how you got your answer” or your feelings of self worth or concept of “equity” when the statics of materials and fatigue sets in before the catastrophic failure.
Just be glad the Apollo program wasn’t run by a bunch of engineers who studied the “muh feelz” version of physics.
The secret to providing “equity” in physics? Make it rhyme…all the time…as a sign…
Easy!
We are already there in Physics. After students take the qualifiers, not only are the grades considered, but also the race of the student. Many Ph.D. candidates that have failed the qualifiers are pushed forward because of their race or gender.
This is insanity. It’s like asking, when are we going to take blackness out of sports? There is no blackness or whiteness in anything anymore. Blacks in this country have to get over the fact that they were enslaved or have been discriminated against. They are not the only group that has been enslaved. Indeed, the word ‘slave’ itself is derived from the enslavement of a white group, the Slavs. Yet, these other groups have gotten over, and they should, too. Moreover, many other groups have been discriminated against in the US: Jews, Irish, Asians, Hispanics, etc., yet each group has thrived in America. If blacks are not thriving, maybe they should ask whether there is something internal to their culture holding them back, such as the 70% of families with fathers absent. We shouldn’t fault someone else; the fault may lay with ourselves. At the end of the day, we in the present generation cannot be held accountable for the actions of past generations, and certainly, neutral subjects, such as physics, cannot be characterized as being white or black. They just are what they are, and that’s it. Writing insanity about this or that subject being white or black reveals the insanity of the writer, not the rest of the world.
Then, it is time for the rest of us to stop catering to their every whim and complaint.
It is time that they, like other races and groups. sink or swim. The Thomas Sowell’s and the Clarence Thomas’s will be the Thomas Sowell’s and the Clarence Thomas’s.
The noise-makers cited in the article will – without this catering – revert to being the shoeshine boys and ditch diggers they would normally be were it not for quotas.
Harsh? You betcha!
A problem arises, however…. A huge number of folk wear some kind of athletic shoe that requires no shining and ditches are dug today by machines operated by skilled people, and built by even more skilled people. The low end jobs are slipping away,
All of that brings to mind the term “obsolete farm machinery”.
Brooms are still pushed by hand. Chipping mortar off of used bricks at demolition sites is still done by hand. Et cetera.
They’re not all slipping away, they’re being done by illegals. The welfare class won’t stoop to common labor when they can make as much sitting home smoking dope.
This theory of “whiteness” simply takes every technique, value, or invention used by white people to succeed – regardless of whether they are also used by non-whites, regardless even if whether they originated with white people – and simply declares them to be “whiteness” and therefore things alien to and against the nature of black people. I can scarcely imagine anything more racist. It’s the same old pseudoscience of racial superiority we were supposed to have left behind in the 19th century, but with a bunch of white guilt added on.
But, IS it “pseudoscience”? Which races developed gun-powder, movable type, written languages, math, the refinement of metals, chemistry, etc?
And, which races never understood the concept of the wheel, or sailed a boat bigger than a hollowed log, and lived in straw huts until the other races came along and built real buildings?
I don’t buy into everyone being equal. We aren’t.
Your explanation even pertains to animals. Bears didn’t get where they are today by being the dumbest animals in the forest.
Physics is EVERYTHING it like everything else doesn’t care about your bigotry.
We must make every degree for the last 20 years invalid
They collaborate with white organizational culture, where ideas and experiences gain value (become more central) when written down.
Um, so writing things down is white supremacy? What do they suggest we do instead?
Make TikTok videos, Rap songs. Anything that doesn’t involve being able to read or write. Because being functionally literate is white also,
Don’t leave out gratuitous use of crude language when (attempting the act of) expressing one’s self.
“His biography indicates he is the Director of Advocacy, Organizing, & Development at Seattle Presbytery, pursues equity-inclusive learning, and is the owner of Equitable Development LLC.”
In other words a useless charlatan who’s learned how to buzzword his race into a lucrative paycheck. Why not, given there are enough people out there willing to kowtow to grifters like him?
Can a white hole and black hole… whore h/t NAACP coexist?
I’ve seen them in tv commercials.
Space is a very forgiving atmosphere. If you attempt your calculations using the 2+2=5 gymnastics, the particles of space will know that you tried your best and your strategy was sound and you’ll make it home alive.
AS a white man discovered the law of gravity, only whites have to obey it. Blacks, you are free to ignore the law of gravity.
Ignore it from tall buildings and high ladders.
It has nothing to do with skin color!
If Pfizer developed a vaccine tomorrow that would make everybody have the same color of skin, it wouldn’t affect a damn thing. All that would happen is some new measure would suddenly appear to explain things.
The same people would still be committing the same crimes, resisting police, rioting, etc. The headlines would change of course—no longer would they say white policeman shoots black man. Skin color would not be mentioned, but some other metric would be used to differentiate and explain it away..
I believe Dr. Suess wrote a book with this idea…
Blatant discrimination, choosing white boards over black boards. Except that using white chalk to mark on the black board would signify white over black……..damn. Oh hey, get rid of white chalk, and only use rainbow colored chalk, problem solved.
More colorful pictorials will solve the problem (they can be easier to convey discrimination between numerical information – oops – sorry to use the word discriminate since this work can only be used by people of color in reference to people not of their color. I mean if historically humanity has come so far with only white chalk on black boards, think of all that our new colorized (white excluded), population will accomplish.
Unfortunately, by supporting this kind of “social science” by labeling it “science”, you undermine your own credibility.
Next time someone says, “look at the facts…” you can dismiss “the facts” as being racist…..
Was Physics more diverse when they used “blackboards” rather than “white boards”?
Before anyone takes crap like this to heart, the authors should be demanded to produce a copy of a serious, scholarly work they have had published in their purported fields of expertise… without having paid to publish it.
What do they say about “dark matter” ?
Dark matter is a scientific myth that was conceived to fill in the missing links in the “big bang theory” of universal creation.
More accurately, it is a scientific hypothesis, as valid as any other.
Many solid scientific phenomena — such as the existence of certain subatomic particles, the gravitational bending of light, neutron clustering, and the mass/diameter relationship of dwarf stars, were hypothesized for a long time before being proven. It was the existence of the hypothesis that encouraged researchers to look in the proper places.
Colored light is the exception, the result of destruction or exclusion processes. White light has universal precedence and privilege.
Yet another excuse for non-white children to use when failing or avoiding STEM courses.
People dreaming this crap up are prime examples of maintaining the plantation mentality and are doing the young absolutely no favors.
I have to admit that I had to laugh when I read this article, because about two years ago, a highly-successful physics-teaching initiative that made white boards a central part of their pedagogy went “woke”, and decided that “high-school physics teachers who identify as white males” need to be re-educated.
Of course I was excoriated by that initiative’s leadership for protesting such tripe. Now, they can read peer-reviewed research stating that their initiative is racist at its core.
As Tim Poole often points out, sooner or later the Woke always eat their own.
I kind of like whiteboards. If he was trying to get rid of Power Point…….he would have a lot more support.
If you want to see who the father of the likes of this idiot should have been, watch Kevin Samuels:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLjodVTY_kZzd3cQ7D82DhA