Not ANOTHER "White Supremacy" talk!

A UMass Boston event by the Center for Innovative Teaching. Wait... Innovative?

The Center for Innovative Teaching (CIT) invited us to a “critical conversation” with Donald Yacovone, the author of Teaching White Supremacy: America’s democratic ordeal and the forging of our national identity, complete with the usual word salad - WHITENESS, banning books about race, white supremacy and the likes.

Ohh, not again, we thought, really, for shizzle! Another ghost of white supremacy, in a book about school textbooks?

But, but, but… Look at his face. His concerned expression was enough to guilt trip us into paying attention. Besides, CIT is the Center for Innovative teaching. He must be on to something new. Something timely, something urgent, right?

Well, the last textbook Yacovone analyzes in his book is from the 1950’s, when parts of the country were literally segregated. But then again, seventy years is nothing compared to the ninety years that separate the oh so racist(!) 2024 American Mathematical Society from the the most recent episode of literal racial discrimination where a black researcher was denied a hotel room at the society conference in 1936¹. In other words, if the schoolbooks of the 1950’s are any evidence of systemic racism in 2024, then Germany is still a full-on Nazi country.

The most ardent racist shown in the book — John H. Van Evrie, a 19th-century New York publisher and Democratic Party propagandist — while a true racist — hardly had anything to do with schoolbooks, the subject of the CIT conversation.

Just as well, the author is especially annoyed with the current young generation who has the audacity to think that racism is “fixed now”. Silly, don’t they know that if/when racism is fixed, the hordes of the DEI operatives will lose their jobs?

Finally, this racist electricity goddess on the cover… let UN speak:

Evidence demonstrates that electricity access has the potential to: increase income, improve education, and decrease poverty.

(UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific)

Soooo surprising… and sooooo racist!

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Why does it matter? Can’t we just ignore this rubbish? No, we can’t. Mirages of white supremacy and systemic racism affect actual policy decisions, and, as a consequence, the lives and well-being of our students.

Indeed, since education is systemically racist, it needs to be demolished and rebuilt anew. Et voila…

At UMass Boston the war on competence is already in full rage. Innovative K-16 educational paradigms are enshrined in our illustrious strategic plan (as in “Kindergarten forever!”, or “Yes, you can’t!”). SATs are optional. GREs are mostly down. ALEKS is unusable (i.e. un-proctored), grades are being abolished. In short, “inclusive excellence” (= exclusive mediocrity) reigning supreme, promulgated by the Mediocrity Mafia (thank you Ayaan Hirsi Ali for such an eloquent denomination!)

What can we say? “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.”

1

A striking documented example [of racial discrimination] occurred at the AMS meeting in December 1936 [boldface ours], co-hosted by Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill. The research William Claytor presented there was praised by Solomon Lefschetz as the “best of the session” and was later published in the Annals of Mathematics, his second paper in that journal. Yet Claytor was not allowed to stay at the conference hotel because he was Black.

— Towards a Fully Inclusive Mathematics Profession. Report of The Task Force on Understanding and Documenting the Historical Role of the AMS in Racial Discrimination (March 22, 2021).