Your Definition Of White Supremacy Is Entirely Too Basic
White supremacy has a lot to answer for. The horrors of the Atlantic slave trade, 100 years of racial segregation, the long, brutal history of lynching that lives on today. White supremacy is the source of centuries of needless suffering and injustice.
Which is why it’s so infuriating to see it trivialised as the source of every pet peeve the internet can think of. Obesity, window-boxes, air-conditioning, classical music, nothing, it seems, is too benign or unrelated.
In my article, What If White Supremacy Isn’t The Problem?, I asked whether this instinct to cry “White supremacy!” at every opportunity is helpful. Or better put, whether it achieves anything for people who need help.
J and I had a very long conversation on this topic. So long, in fact, that I’m only including part of it here. The conversation goes on, I kid you not, for at least four times as long as the segment I’ve shared below, but we cover all the main points here.
J:
Out of nowhere, “white supremacy” was being used to describe mathematics,
YES – how we teach math is absolutely racist (as are many stupidities we take for granted). We credit whites for a ton of theorems without acknowledging the foundational role of Egyptians, Moors, and Indians in the field. Your definition of white supremacy is entirely too basic. The KKK doesn’t grow out of thin air, but from the soil of white supremacy culture.
Steve QJ:
Your definition of white supremacy is entirely too basic.
And yours is entirely too diffuse.
The way we teach maths is racist? Seriously? Are you really arguing that the only racially appropriate way to teach maths (even the concept of a racially appropriate way to teach maths is preposterous) is to turn it into a history lesson about where the concept of zero came from or to teach black kids to count in base 20 like the Yoruba? Would this benefit black kids or put them at a disadvantage? Like, what is it that you want to achieve?! What's your endgame?!
Don't you think these kids would be better served simply learning the mathematical concepts, free of arguments about the race of Pythagoras or Archimedes? Can't it just be for everybody? Especially given that if maths is rooted in white supremacy, somebody clearly forgot to tell Asians.
J:
Like, what is it that you want to achieve?! What's your endgame?!
I want schools to stop telling my son -- by both suggestion and omission -- that whites invented mathematics, and everything else civilization depends on.
I don't care for a "racially appropriate" curriculum -- just an accurate one, where the ancestors of Europeans don't take center stage, or limit how we communicate certain abstractions.
I also don't care to be as "good" at regurgitating formulas as some other ethnic groups -- who are more willing to "succeed" at the cost of self-negating indoctrination.
Steve QJ:
I want schools to stop telling my son -- by both suggestion and omission -- that whites invented mathematics
I mean no disrespect, but I hope your son grows up wise enough to not be worried about the skin colour of the people who invented each aspect of mathematics.
I hope instead he learns, perhaps with the help of his father, that people of all colours have made huge contributions to the things civilisation depends on, and that life isn't a team sport where we're only allowed to cheer for the people whose skin is the same colour as ours.
I also think curricula should be accurate. But I don't think they should waste time on irrelevancies. If your son's teachers are telling him that white people invented mathematics (which I don't believe they are), this is inaccurate. I'm completely with you on calling that inaccuracy out.
But if they simply aren't breaking down each contribution to maths by skin colour, I think that's exactly as it should be. I hope we one day feel no more tempted to highlight people's skin colour, when it's not relevant, than we do their eye colour.
J:
I hope instead he learns, perhaps with the help of his father, that people of all colours have made huge contributions to the things civilisation depends on, and that life isn't a team sport where we're only allowed to cheer for the people whose skin is the same colour as ours.
Oh I teach him this, as I must -- otherwise he'd have to wait until college or graduate school for any hint that Africans were long past the tribal phase before contact with Europeans.
Schools do cheerlead for one skin color, no matter how much some try to deny this fact.
They'll break down what each European mathematician "brought us", and let hang in mid air the implication that we need not look beyond that continent for more contributors. You know this as well as I do, Steve, though I taught mathematics up to the high school level and can confirm it hasn't changed.
Steve QJ:
Africans were long past the tribal phase before contact with Europeans.
My question is, why are you teaching him that this is anything to do with him? Don't you see that you're teaching him to think of himself and his value in terms of the colour of his skin? That you're tying his self-esteem to what happened thousands of years ago in Africa when he was born far more recently in America? Do you really think this is the healthiest way for him or any child to think? Again, what is it you want to achieve?
I'm not suggesting that you shouldn't teach him history accurately. When I was a kid I actually did learn about the roots of the number zero in Mesopotamia and India and Egypt. I learned about innovations like the abacus. I learned that the "Pythagorean" theorem was well known long before Pythagoras was born.
But, and this is important, I didn't ever feel as if the colour of these people's skin mattered. And less still that it had anything to do with me. I was top of my class in maths as it happens. In an all white school. I didn't need it to be explained to me through an "African" lens for this to be possible. I didn't care about the skin colour of the people who developed these ideas. I think you do a disservice to anybody you teach to think otherwise.
J:
Don't you see that you're teaching him to think of himself and his value in terms of the colour of his skin?
Who is really teaching him this?
In kindergarten he drew "self-portraits" with blue eyes and straight hair. My fellow black parents witness the same with their kids. If he wasn't being taught every single day to hate his skin and hair I wouldn't bother with de-programing.
Skin color becomes irrelevant only after we learn to love black despite all the propaganda to the contrary.
I learned some of the same anecdotes you listed. As you know, that was all at the very periphery of the mathematics curriculum, where Gauss, Descartes, Euler, Newton and other Europeans take center stage when it's all said and done.
Don't get me wrong, these fellows were amazing, but we force teenagers to study their work for no real reason -- except perhaps to push a narrative about who the thought leaders are in math and science, while touting the virtues of "objectivity."
Like it or not, we have a history -- and it didn't start with slavery, as most schools suggest. Unfortunately, I have to teach my son real history to counteract the ridiculous lies and omissions being fed to him regularly.
Steve QJ:
Skin color becomes irrelevant only after we learn to love black.
I'd just make one small but important amendment to this. Skin colour becomes irrelevant only after we learn to love ourselves.
Black people aren't in a competition with white people for who did most for mathematics or science or music or art. All of these things belong to all of us. No, Gauss and Descartes and Euler etc, didn't take centre stage. Algebra and calculus and cartesian geometry did. I thank God nobody was encouraging me to consider the skin colour of the people who invented them.
I think that we adults often project our struggles onto our children and then "protect" them from them. I don't want to be interpreted as trying to tell you how to raise your son. I understand completely that that's none of my business. But I want to assure you, there's a world of difference between teaching your kid to love himself, and teaching him to define himself by his blackness.
I sincerely wish you the best of luck in threading that needle.
I often highlight the pitfalls of seeing sexuality or gender or the colour of one’s skin as an “identity.” But seeing the pitfalls doesn’t mean they’re easy to avoid. And they’re even harder to climb out of once you’ve fallen in.
Whether it’s the fight against racism or homophobia or sexism, they’re all battles for the minds of future generations. To shield them from the mistakes we’ve been making for centuries. To teach them not to divide themselves over arbitrary differences. To leave them a world where their problems have better answers than “white supremacy.”
From arithmetic to a university degree, I've studied mathematics. Math classes are about its principles, not its history. European mathematicians get no more credit than Arabic ones. An entire university class in Fourier analysis, we never even heard his first name.
I've read about math history on my own. And there was no shortage of references to non-European trailblazers.
This is a dumb tangent.
With regard to the math context, I feel blessed that my math teachers were not wannabe history teachers. It was never important to me where it came from. The steady white supremacy drone is something else.
I recently read a Medium article that talked about white supremacy in Thailand that caught my eye. My wife watches Thai television over the internet and has mentioned that the "stars" are fair skinned and have Western (white) facial features. Surgery or biracial, probably a bit of both. My brown skinned wife notices. While the changes in facial features are new, the light vs. dark skin thing is old news. Fifty plus years ago she spoke matter-of-factly without disparagement of how the women in Chang Mai were light skinned.
Light and dark unmistakably Asian people have always been a thing and perhaps it's just that I failed to notice it making a difference to them. The vanishing wide pug nose does seem to be an embrace of white beauty standards. She calls it the old Thai face vs. the new Thai face. Could that have something to do with white supremacy? I'm not the right person to answer that. Their history is quite different from ours. The beginning of the abolition of slavery in Thailand began in 1874. Slavery there, as in most of world history had no connection to Trans-Saharan or Trans-Atlantic slavery. They don't have that issue.
When I think of white supremacy, I think of the Ku Klux Klan, and I have no doubt that the use of that label is intended to bring that association. Does the Asian embrace of white beauty standards have anything to do with that? For that matter, does the current trend in black women adopting the long straight hair of their Asian and south of the border sisters have something to do with White supremacism? I didn't try to discuss it with the author of the article because he proceeded to outright racism and I just didn't have the energy for a discussion with someone who labels me a racist because of the color of my skin. An exercise in futility.
I will ask here. Where is the line between actual white supremacy and everything white is white supremacy? Why is that so hard?