Her PhD thesis: ‘Rupturing Antiblackness in Mathematics Education Research: BlackQuantCrit as Theory, Methodology and Praxis’
Remember Rochelle Gutierrez? She’s the, uh, genius who believes mathematics “has been controlled by global white supremacy.”
As such, Gutierrez says “every area of mathematics might come to the conclusions it does because of white supremacy.”
Further, there are no absolute truths and knowledge in math because the subject should be moral, rather than rational, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor says.
Is it any wonder why the presenter of “Mathematx: Towards a way of Being” has critical RateMyProfessors comments such as “Her ideas are not sane,” “she talks about privilege all the time” and “I was quite embarrassed that I shared the same intellectual space with someone who is confused about math”?
It seems Marquette University digs Gutierrez’s theories because it recently highlighted — and hired — an admirer of hers whose doctoral thesis is titled “Rupturing Antiblackness in Mathematics Education Research: BlackQuantCrit as Theory, Methodology and Praxis.”
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MORE: 1619 Project releases new ‘reparations math’ curriculum for high school students
Like Gutierrez, Blake O’Neal Turner (pictured) claims math “is not racially, politically or culturally neutral.”
“Mathematics is considered whiteness” because it guides, as Turner put it, “who gets credit for doing mathematics, whose mathematics do we take as valid and relevant.”
“Those things tend to marginalize Black and non-Black students of color,” Turner continues. “They’re used even when we think of testing. There’s these ‘achievement gaps,’ but our research is showing that its opportunity gaps, particularly for Black and non-Black students of color. That context matters and we have to take that into consideration.” …
“I am definitely a different teacher having done this research than I was before,” Turner says. “We have a lot of conversations about how we can be critically reflective and check our own positionality and recognize the way that we did education models the way that we were trained as students and as learners.
It’s certainly not uncommon for critical theorists to masquerade nonsense with a hip-sounding word salad (“Mathematx”? “BlackQuantCrit”? “Check our own positionality”?), so when you see such, brace yourself.
One really has to ponder the motivations of educationists like Gutierrez and Turner. Do they not want the very demographics they claim they want to help to succeed in American society? Or are they so drunk with disdain for things Western that those demographics are a secondary concern?
After all, a recent report details how college professors are quite concerned about how poorly incoming students are prepared in mathematics. They say freshmen can’t subtract a positive integer from a negative, or even add two fractions together.
Given that Turner teaches prospective teachers, don’t expect a lot of improvement.
MORE: U. Maryland professor gets $600k grant to make math more ‘diverse’ and ‘equitable’
IMAGE: Marquette U.
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