Coyote Blog

It is hard for me to imagine anything that white surpremacists could do to permanently impoverish African-Americans than some of the things the woke are supporting.  Case in point is this story from Oregon:

The Oregon Department of Education (ODE) recently encouraged teachers to register for training that encourages "ethnomathematics" and argues, among other things, that White supremacy manifests itself in the focus on finding the right answer.

An ODE newsletter sent last week advertises a Feb. 21 "Pathway to Math Equity Micro-Course," which is designed for middle school teachers to make use of a toolkit for "dismantling racism in mathematics." The event website identifies the event as a partnership between California's San Mateo County Office of Education, The Education Trust-West and others.

Part of the toolkit includes a list of ways "white supremacy culture" allegedly "infiltrates math classrooms." Those include "the focus is on getting the 'right' answer," students being "required to 'show their work,'" and other alleged manifestations.

"The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so," the document for the "Equitable Math" toolkit reads. "Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict."

Steve Martin used to have a comedy routine where he would say something like, "wouldn't it be funny to teach your kids how to talk wrong.  On their first day in Kindergarten class they would walk up to the teacher and exclaim, "Mumbo dogface in the banana patch!"  That had a certain dark humor to it but teaching kids to do math wrong in real life is simply insane.

There are a lot of things that set the groundwork for this, and I am not an expert on post-modernism and critical race theory.  But one factor that is not often credited is a cargo cult mentality.  Folks look at successful white people and observe they all went to college, and then infer that if we just get all the black kids into college, they will be successful too.  Their resulting plan is to reduce or eliminate standards that are perceived to be keeping black kids out of college.

The problem of course is that college is not the cause of prosperity, but a marker (with prosperity) of other traits -- focus on long-term goals, discipline, hard work, and yes knowing 2+2=4.  This sort of woke BS just makes it worse, because it attacks the real roots of prosperity.  There are real barriers to poor blacks achieving prospecity -- eg how do you focus on long-term goals when you don't know where you are sleeping tonight or when you have no role models who do so -- but the purity and objectivity of math is not among these.

This sort of cargo cult thinking can be seen all the time in Progressive economic proscriptions.  The government push for home ownership is another -- middle class people own homes so if low income people owned homes they would become middle class.  Now, this has a bit of accuracy in that, like the stock market, the elite have goosed the housing market to always go up.  But leaving that aside for a moment, owning a home vs renting is a terrible decision for many people -- it piles on a lot of financial risk but perhaps more importantly it limits geographic mobility which used to be critical to lower-income people improving their lot.