National Science Fdn. Paid $300K to Study ‘Why White, Male Physicists Don’t Fight Racism, Sexism in STEM’
“While white men have an extra ability to confront sexism and racism, their good intentions are insufficient.”
This is racism dressed up as the pursuit of scholarship.
The College Fix reports:
Feds paid $300,000 to study why white, male physicists don’t fight racism, sexism in STEM
White, cis, male physicists with “good intentions” aren’t doing enough to fight the racism and sexism from which they benefit, argued two education researchers in a recently published article in the International Journal of STEM Education.
Co-principal investigators Melissa Dancy of Western Michigan University and Apriel Hodari of Eureka Scientific Inc., were able to determine their findings in part thanks to a nearly $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.
“While white men have an extra ability to confront sexism and racism, their good intentions are insufficient. Having an impact requires them to extend significant effort to understand the role they currently play in maintaining sexism and racism,” states the abstract of the article, headlined “How well-intentioned white male physicists maintain ignorance of inequity and justify inaction.”
Dancy describes herself in the June STEM article as a middle-class, white cis-woman who “has experienced many frustrating experiences engaging white men in dialog.”
Hodari “grounds her positionality in her identities as both a small Black girl who fell in love with mathematics” and “a working-class city kid” with a “hungry brain.”
The pair and their team interviewed 27 self-identified, white, male graduate students and faculty from 15 different physics departments across the United States, all of whom claimed to be knowledgeable about equity-related issues and generally believed in advancing equity-related causes.
Interview questions centered on the experiences of these physicists acknowledging, discussing, and confronting sexism and racism, especially in their own classrooms, labs, departments, and schools.
Questions also honed in on the physicists’ thoughts on recent studies purportedly demonstrating inequity and discrimination in STEM.
The authors then used a “lens of critical discourse” to better understand the relationship between the beliefs and actions of the white male physicists and a “epistemology of ignorance framing.”
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The authors are not physicists, they are science educators. They received $300,000 from NSF to interview 27 physicists. Your tax dollars at work.
I don’t know what Melissa Dancy is. She works at an ambiguously-named thing called the “Evaluation Center”, sounds like CIA or similar.
https://wmich.edu/evaluation/directory/dancy
Now they’re going after physics. They need to be told the same thing most people claiming discrimination need to be told: white men and/or Asian men are just better at that thing than your group is, and that’s why they are overrepresented.
I respectfully disagree.
There is clearly a tremendous racial disparity in these fields which I don’t think is based on a different aptitude among races. I suspect black immigrants are better represented. Our education system, combined with cultural situations and habits seem to deter many blacks from seeking academic excellence. Now with CRT instilling the idea that all aspects of education are racist, blacks are being essentially told that we must lower standards for everyone in order for blacks to succeed. Sheer lunacy and incredibly harmful to blacks. I should hope social scientists and psychologists are studying Asian families to try to determine how families of other races can adapt their practices in their homes.
Regarding women, again I don’t think the fact that fewer women choose to enter these fields is due to aptitude and intelligence. I think women naturally tend to gravitate more to biological sciences than to the physical sciences. In short, I think there are many women who could perform quite successfully in these fields but find other fields more in keeping with their “nurturing nature”.
Simply put: they have more important things to do and occupy within their headspace.
Studies like this one always proceed from the assumption that there is systemic racism, sexism, or some other ‘-ism’ that requires some remedy. How about maybe there are not a lot of minorities, females, or transgender quadriplegic albinos studying physics or STEM? Why not study why that is instead of trying to blame their absence on white guys?
Raising a question based on a false premise is an old trick. The basic false premise is that the demographics of physics professionals should reflect that of the general population. If this was true for physics professionals it would be true for all work categories including nursing, coal mining, Chinese language instruction, classical musician, professional basket ball player. Just a fraction of thought would lead on to doubt this premise applies to the above work categories. Since it is not true for many work categories, it cannot be true in general for all work categories.
The more interesting question, in my opinion, is what drives the variations in choices made by individuals to engage in different work categories?
“White, cis, male physicists with “good intentions” aren’t doing enough to fight the racism and sexism from which they benefit, argued two education researchers”
Do you pay them to do this? Is it in their job description?
No? Then you must have us confused with your slaves, massa.
The destruction of American education will be complete once they get college physics.
In all woke “studies” like this, the answer is pre-ordained to be “racism.” In this case, they will attribute the smaller numbers of women and minorities in physics to intentional or subconscious “racism and sexism.”
Actual studies that aren’t driven by woke politics have shown time and again that it is math ability and achievement that predicts success in physics. Those students who have a weak math background are likely to have trouble in physics and drop out.
Recent drives toward “equity” in teaching high-school math will ensure that ALL students have equally weak math backgrounds, and unless they study math outside of school, they will likely do poorly in freshman physics.
Maybe they aren’t fighting racism for the same reason I didn’t as a conservation engineer. I had a job to do. I was not being paid to fight racism. I was paid to find ways to save energy for my customers.
Perhaps she confuses haranguing with dialog.
How do “white men have an extra ability to confront sexism and racism”? I thought White men were supposed to shut up and go to the back of the room? Seems to be conflicting positions and double standards out of the Left, as normal.
Falling apples taste good.