I mean I haven’t read the article yet but I can only see how certain word problems could be racist but not math as a whole lol.
Yes it is. How come X,Y, and Z are used the most compared to others? 
Its a discrimination. 
I don’t think so… Yes they use some letters more than others but that’s not racist.
@Students what do you think?
I was skeptical when I started reading this article, but what they said makes a lot of sense.
There’s this book called The Bell Curve in which white supremacists take statistics about differences in IQ between races and go “SEE?! WHITE PEOPLE ARE BETTER THAN BLACK PEOPLE” but they present it in a pseudo-scientific way that makes a bunch of people buy into their messages.
What they’re failing to realise is that IQ is massively determined by environment and also that there is no such thing as an IQ test that doesn’t test knowledge in any way. If you’re a kid who was never taught what algebra is, it doesn’t matter how naturally smart you are. You’re going to fail the algebra section of the IQ test because it’s like you’re being asked questions in a completely different language.
The same applies for verbal reasoning sections of IQ tests, Cat is to dog what lion is to…
It doesn’t matter how smart you are. If you don’t speak English very well or you don’t know what any of those words mean, you’re going to fail the verbal reasoning section.
And then there’s issues like how malnutrition and lead paint in housing can play a massive role in the brain development of children. Looking at the statistics of the children who are subject to malnutrition and lead paint, you can see that they disproportionately affect children of colour, so of course the children can’t reach their full potential! If more black children are subject to things that cause them to be unable to perform to the best of their abilities on IQ tests, of course more black kids are going to do badly on IQ tests than white kids!
So what the article said here resonated with me:
“The numbers are objective,” she said, “but how we use it is not objective.”
If people were taught in school how they can deal with the racist ways we use maths to further an agenda, people would be less likely to fall for stuff like The Bell Curve because they would be more likely to say “Ok. What is the context of this?”
I guess that what this programme is trying to do is show people that it is important to question how numbers are used. People fall for Ben Shapiro’s “facts don’t care about your feelings”, but only the truly smart ask how those facts are being used to prop up some opinions.
Like, a nazi saying over 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust has a whole different meaning to a human rights group saying it. But the fact is the same.
That’s the thing with a lot of right wingers. They see stuff like this and it’s like their lizard brain can’t stop and say “wait. what do they actually mean” and read up on it. They just go “lEaVe My MaThS aLoNe” and shut their brain off to the facts.
closed due to inactivity