White privilege bolstered by teaching math

[Dill]

(10-27-2017, 10:31 PM)JustWinBaby Wrote: Read what I quoted in #25.  I don't know, the implication seemed pretty clear to me, but perhaps you were attempting to say something else.

Don't need to read it. I wrote it. I recognize my unqualified reference to "imbalance" may have mislead you. I took it for granted that everyone understands that hard science funding, basic and applied, federal and corporate, is enormous compared to  humanities funding. Figure 300-400 BILLION dollars a year. Federal humanities funding was around 140 MILLION in 2014.Down from around 400 million in 1979. Gender studies would be a tiny fraction of that. And Trump now wants to eliminate the National Endowment for the Humanities. So we can expect further reductions in federal support for social/critical studies of the sort Gutierrez carries out. (Trump's proposed 2018 budget, by the way, would also mean significant cuts to basic research funding in hard sciences as well https://www.aaas.org/news/first-trump-budget-proposes-massive-cuts-several-science-agencies. The Trump anti-science base will be pleased.)

So Guitierrez' complaints about the funding imbalance in research are related to this overall state of affairs. No one is imagining parity between gender studies and diabetes research.

As far as what I was attempting to say, my response to Matt's query was to provide some sense of the larger research paradigm in which she and other critical scholars work.  She is adapting critical race theory to math teaching in the wake of a decades long shift in control of education away from educational professionals and towards people who have never themselves taught, but demand "accountability" by their (corporate) metrics, both from teachers and students. Some of the former, and many administrators, are all on board with this shift.

This shift is driven in part by uncritical conceptions of education and basic knowledge which, as I said above, assume the neutrality of disciplinary knowledge, especially math. Guitierrez challenges this.

Perhaps now we are at point now where we can actually examine the arguments/research behind claims like --

"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"

This is hardly new and she is hardly the only one making such claims.