Sometimes academia produces asininity beyond parody and one professor at the University of Illinois has come up with a theory so ridiculous that even the creators of South Park would think it was a bit too much.
According to Campus Reform, Professor Rochelle Guitierrez argued that teachers must be aware of the “politics that mathematics brings” in our society. That politics?
White Privilege.
No really. According to Guitierrez, math is racist because a lot of words used in the mathematical lexicon originate in predominately white European countries like Greece.
“On many levels, mathematics itself operates as Whiteness. Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as White,” said Gutierrez.
Guitierrez added that math encourages white privilege because “curricula emphasizing terms like Pythagorean theorem and pi perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans.”
This apparently perpetuates a form of “unearned” white privilege as well, because most math professors are white. This apparently encourages minorities to be viewed as racial lessers because there are fewer black or Hispanic math professors.
This, claims Guitierrez, creates microaggressions in the classroom…or something:
“If one is not viewed as mathematical, there will always be a sense of inferiority that can be summoned,” she says, adding that there are so many minorities who “have experienced microaggressions from participating in math classrooms… [where people are] judged by whether they can reason abstractly.”
To fight this, Gutierrez encourages aspiring math teachers to develop a sense of “political conocimiento,” a Spanish phrase for “political knowledge for teaching.”
Guitierezz believes that all knowledge is “relational,” adding that learning must be viewed “subjectively,” not “objectively.”
To put it simply, Guitierrez is promoting the idea that feelings should come before the facts.
Social justice. Not even once.
Welcome to academia in the modern age, folks.
(h/t: Daily Caller)
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