Miserable people can't stand it when those around them aren't. To find a safe space where they could all be unhappy together, they created Critical Race Theory (CRT) studies, and for a time were largely walled off from the rest of us so that we could live free from their all-consuming ennui.
But the CRT crowd grew bored torturing each other, and decided they needed to torture the rest of us, too.
It began in the "soft" sciences of liberal arts colleges and legal circles where talk is elevated above more concrete things like the calculations necessary to keep planes aloft and buildings standing.
Actually, it really flowered in the very soft sciences like gender studies that were less studies and more 4-year therapy sessions for emotionally troubled co-eds with poor relationships with their fathers.
In any case, they remained dissatisfied as the perpetually aggrieved are wont to do, and so they set their sites on the hard sciences, where people still had the temerity to be successful, find fulfillment in their work, and worst of all... be happy.
The study at hand is only the most recent example, but an appropriate one in that it fully captures the inherent racism of these screeds, and is so deeply stupid that it will now likely be heralded as both brave and stunning.
Observing whiteness in introductory physics: A case study
Here is how it starts (PDF).
Within whiteness, the organization of social life is in terms of a center and margins that are based on dominance, control, and a transcendent figure that is consistently and structurally ascribed value over and above other figures. In this paper, we synthesize literature from Critical Whiteness Studies and Critical Race Theory to articulate analytic markers for whiteness, and use the markers to identify and analyze whiteness as it shows up in an introductory physics classroom interaction.
Can eyes bleed from reading? Because I think my eyes are bleeding.
It then trots out the "evidence" of systemic racism, that evidence being the classic error of confusing correlation with causation.
Critical Race Theory names that racism and white supremacy are endemic to all aspects of U.S. society, from employment to schooling to the law. We see the outcomes of this in, for example, differential incarceration rates, rates of infection and death in the era of COVID, and police brutality. We also see the outcomes of this in physics...almost 16% of the U.S. population aged 20–24 years is Black, only 3% of bachelor's degrees in physics and 1.8% of doctorate degrees are awarded to Black students. This is in contrast to about 73% of the U.S. population aged 20–24 being white, and 72% and 75%, respectively, of bachelor's and doctorate degrees being awarded to white students.
Note what they don't highlight from their own citation: Asians outperform even more than whites.
Regardless, enormous amounts of scholarly work has been done, by black scholars, to explain these disparities and in so doing, maybe even offer something useful to address these outcomes.
But why let that spoil a good time?
The authors go on to note specific disparities in physics, including all manner of notations to "prove" that it is whiteness that is the problem.
They never think you'll check the receipts.
I checked the receipts.
Recent work by Physicists and Physics Students of Color point to a number of mechanisms, from being repeatedly asked why they are in physics courses or told to change majors...
I checked the first footnote, No. 11. It doesn't say anyone was "told to change majors." It says this:
These were particularly clear in the analysis of respondents who expressed an intention to transfer to another university, to stop out (take a break for one or more terms with the intention of returning) or to change majors.
They weren't told. They made the decision themselves.
The document referenced in No. 12 was behind a paywall, but I was able to pull up No. 13.
The phrase "change major" did not appear in the document, but I didn't want to be pedantic and so gave them the benefit of the doubt and started searching using similar terms.
I got a two hits with "leave."
...many Black students still choose not to enter or to leave the discipline.
Because we see the inability to cultivate a healthy physics identity as something that contributes to the trend of Black folks not choosing to enter, and deciding to leave the physics discipline,...
It is legitimately troubling that black students tend to leave physics, and it would be worthwhile to find out why... but why hype it, why claim they are being "told" to leave when the very studies they cite say no such thing?
The final note allegedly supporting the claim was also behind a paywall, so I moved on to the next claim:
...suffering unequal consequences for engaging in physics norms of competitive argumentation.
This was supported by No. 15 which wasn't a study at all, but rather a personal anecdote written by physicist Chandra Prescod-Weinstein on the blog platform, "Medium."
We never start with slavery, but my narrative as a queer Afro-Caribbean Black Ashkenazi Jewish femme particle physicist necessarily starts with it because my existence is shaped entirely in the wake of slavery, in the wake of trying to imagine what science means to the slave and her great great grandchildren.
"Necessarily starts with it."
No, it doesn't. This is self-destructive narcissistic navel-gazing at its most extreme.
It goes on like that at some length, just one long anecdote invested with this woman's own personal pathos presented as supporting evidence in a scientific paper.
Prescod-Weinstein is a professor at the University of New Hampshire. She's a particle physicist. She's a regular columnist at New Scientist, and yet her "existence is shaped entirely in the wake of slavery, in the wake of trying to imagine what science means to the slave and her great great grandchildren"?
Guess what? It's science. It means the same to you as it does to me – as it does to anyone.
That's what science is.
So, to sum up, in the section purporting to offer support for their argument that the physics community suffers from systemic racism, three of the five notes I could pull up either contradicted the contention or in the case of the last one was little more than an extended diary entry.
I was going to stop there, but I wanted to be fair.
So I decided to check one more claim.
...to being disparaged by colleagues, not looked in the eye, and excluded from study groups.
Powerful stuff, particularly that point about not being "looked in the eye." Intentionally visceral.
These were supported by notes 9, 12, and 16.
No. 9 had nothing about study groups or anything about looking into someone's eyes. It did have one entry for "disparagement."
Participants noted incidents where they have been disparaged by colleagues
No one is above critique, regardless of identity. However, several POC have noted that individuals within PER have attacked some participants' professional reputation behind their backs.
Several.
"Behind their backs," no less.
Is this a study, or a middle school counseling session.
No. 12 I couldn't access.
No. 16 actually had quite a bit about the exclusion from study groups, except it contradicted itself as to the cause.
The ethnic and racial composition of the study groups seem to be more salient than gender positionally.
The Black women say being a woman is more of an issue than being Black in their physics departments.
So, which is it? Gender or race?
It also had nothing about eyes and nothing about disparagement that I could find.
I'm not even refuting their claims doing my own research and pulling up my own citations.
I'm using theirs.
I moved on.
For example, DiAngelo writes...
This is usually the part where I stop reading. It's not that I'm close-minded, but I already paid my dues having read and reviewed White Fragility.
Still, maybe this time will be diff...
"While one may explicitly reject the notion that one is inherently better than another, one cannot avoid internalizing the message of white superiority, as it is ubiquitous in mainstream culture."
And of course by "one" she means herself.
The demons this woman carries around would keep the entire faculty of a psychiatric teaching hospital engaged for years.
The best part?
This is the footnote they include for DiAngelo.
DiAngelo, a white woman, has been critiqued by Activists of Color for profiting from her work on whiteness.
They do devour their own, don't they?
The bulk of the study centers on a simulated instructional episode involving three students working through a problem with an instructor.
That's their evidence. A contrived episode with three people.
Participants.—The focal episode in this paper features three students,... In a stimulated recall interview, Paris refers to herself as a "Hispanic woman," and to Drake and Gail as "he" and "she," respectively. Gail presents as white, and Drake as middle Eastern.4 Iris self-identifies as biracial and culturally white and uses she, her, hers pronouns.
Note the footnote for Drake:
4 Middle Eastern is considered white according to U.S. federally mandated race categories, but middle Eastern people in the U.S. are subjected to and oppressed by white supremacy and Islamophobia.
Buckle up for the next part, because Drake becomes the fall guy for whiteness later.
The participants' race and gender do not feature prominently in our analysis; our analysis focuses on whiteness as a social organization, with the aim of illustrating how "everyday" interactions in physics classrooms reflect and reify whiteness.
Yep, they couldn't find a white dude, so they plugged in an Arab as a stand-in and figure, hey, good enough!
Naming Gail and Drake's racial and/or ethnic identities for them, as we have, is fraught.
Now comes the part where they outline the conclusion of this study before they actually perform the study.
However, because this classroom interaction takes place in the context of U.S. higher education, which is far from gender or race neutral [3,51], we can assume that the participants' race and gender do matter; they matter for the discursive positions available to them and they matter in the sociohistorical context in which the interaction is playing out...
Much of this section involves complex diagrams.
The pictures, the drawing of arrows. I've seen this kind of high-level analysis before.
Oh, yeah, one of my son's fourth-grade science projects.
In this section we use the analytic markers that we named in Sec. II to substantiate our claim that whiteness is reproduced in this physics classroom episode and to identify some of the physics tools, practices, and disciplinary values that reify and reconstitute it.
You went looking for a specific outcome, and you found it!
Whiteness as social organization normalizes and rewards the creation and maintaining of a well-defined center and margins. In this episode, classroom activity is organized in such a way as to make normal the centering of Drake and the representation he constructs, over and above the sense making that Paris and Gail are doing.
The Middle Eastern guy illustrated whiteness by drawing attention away from two women.
It goes on like that for a while, but permit me to pull out just one more example:
The dreaded whiteboard.
...whiteboards display written information for public consumption; they draw attention to themselves and in this case support the centering of an abstract representation and the person standing next to it, presenting. They collaborate with white organizational culture, where ideas and experiences gain value (become more central) when written down.
Got that?
Writing things down is a sign of whiteness.
Let's just sum it up before I really have to start drinking.
This study starts with a series of assertions regarding the roll that systemic "whiteness" plays in oppressing people that is both unsupported and contradicted by their own citations.
Undeterred, the study throws two women together with a man, and when the man dominates label it as proof of whiteness even though the guy was middle eastern.
Did I miss anything?
Oh, yes, the racism.
In fact, this is their very first footnote:
In this paper, in most cases we choose not to capitalize white and do choose to capitalize Black, Hispanic, and Students or People of Color... For example, Dumas writes that Black is a "self-determined name of a racialized social group that shares a specific set of histories, cultural processes, and imagined and performed kinships." White, on the other hand, is a socially constructed category that was created for the purposes of dominance and exclusion; it "does not describe a group with a sense of common experiences or kinship outside of acts of colonization or terror."
Got that? Leave aside fora moment on how deeply insulting and condescending it is to the rich tapestry of cultures among black Americans to be lumped all together like that, and focus on how they define that culture: a set of histories, cultural processes, and kinships.
Now contrast that with their description of white people, who's only common experiences are "acts of colonization or terror."
It's also cultural poison.
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