#sciencemustfall: our bad science and our bad faith
[Author’s note: in what follows I am committing what Deleuze calls the injustice of speaking for others. Most problematically, I am representing black pain. I have, however, attempted to avoid making assumptions about specific people’s experiences and tried instead to reiterate those experiences that have been directly shared with me via several conceptual personae, in an attempt to encourage critical dialogue about the bad faith that has been demonstrated by so many people around #sciencemustfall.]
A video is shared online. In it, a young black woman speaks with conviction about what it means to decolonize science. About how we must throw all of Western science away and start again. About lightning and indigenous knowledge. About Newton. Fuck that guy and the gravity he parachuted in on.
‘Cry my beloved country,’ exclaims the entire white internet, ‘what an idiot! Does she not understand science at all?’
Three seconds later, everyone is adroitly expounding on the scientific method. Terms like ‘critical thinking,’ ‘universality,’ ‘falsification’ and ‘epistemology’ are bandied about. The coruscating light of reason is invoked and with a cry of ‘Dawkins, banish this woo!’ the student movement and decolonization are swiftly and conclusively proven to be false by a three minute Youtube clip and a hashtag. Litanies of horrors spew forth and there’s talk of mud huts and ‘without us you wouldn’t have electricity.’
Later in the day, stupidity vanquished, the middle class commentariat returns to retweeting Ivo Vegter, booking flights to New Zealand and sharing pictures of the wild eyed student terrorists of Braamfontein, resplendent in their Pumas as they wave their pangas at the police while dancing on the rooftops of burning buses, summoning lighting from the sky.
And science is left in an even worse state.
Scenario 1:
You are a high school teacher and you’ve given your Grade 12 students — who are currently learning about statistical significance and extrapolating from data — an assignment to research the #FeesMustFall movement and present their understanding of what it means to decolonize science. You know that there has been a lot of thought about decolonization within the student movement over the past 18 months — that this has produced reading lists, experiments in radical pedagogy, papers, proposals and countless debates — and you expect some interesting interpretations from your learners.
Reading through the assignments three weeks later, you come across one that is particularly scathing, that completely denounces the credibility of the decolonization project, dismissing it as irrational and anti-science. You call the learner responsible for the assignment up to your desk and ask him what research he undertook to arrive at this unwavering conclusion.
‘I watched a three minute video clip of a person who was talking about decolonizing science.’
What mark do you give this learner for their thorough and methodical data collection? For their representative sampling? For the amount of effort they have expended in attempting to understand their research subject? What have they understood about the scientific method? Going through the rest of the assignments, you discover that they’ve almost all been copied from this one and you realise that perhaps there is something deeply, deeply wrong with how you’ve been teaching.
Scenario 2:
You are a faculty member, participating in a spontaneous open conversation about the decolonization of science. During the energetic two hour back-and-forth, a young woman whose political views you strongly disagree with and whom you find brash and arrogant stands up and says something about African knowledges and throwing away Western science in order to start again. You find some of what she’s saying to be an absurd misrepresentation of science but, if you’re charitable (as you know scientists should be), it sounds similar to some of the more nuanced discussions you’ve already heard about decolonizing curricula and epistemological pluralism, and she seems to be making her grandiose claims with the context of some broader points that are unclear but may be of merit.
How do you respond? Do you wait until she is finished and ask for clarity? Do you give her an opportunity to elaborate? Do you constructively challenge her with the aim of gently encouraging her to be wrong better next time? Or do you instead allow your personal sentiments and confirmation bias to cloud your capacity for reasoned, critical debate and laugh at her ignorance, assuming in the process that you know exactly what she meant the first time around? You always know exactly what people mean. You know that Europe is a continent and India is not. You can’t wait to tell her why she is so wrong.
Scenario 3:
You are a student. For the past 18 months you have also been a Fallist. The movement has articulated so much of your experience as a young black woman. It has given words to those previously ineffable feelings of inferiority and prejudice. It has taught you that being poor is not your fault. It has empowered you. Shared new and marginalised knowledge with you, knowledge you are actively exploring and incorporating into your life. A new language you’re still practising and slowly becoming fluent in.
Exercising your newly emboldened voice you raise your hand during a discussion about decolonizing science and wait for a chance to speak.
When your turn comes, there’s so much you want to say. You want to tell people how the way science is taught invalidates your experience. How it implies that everything of value, apart from some token concessions, came from the West. How even the examples are always either white or horribly patronising. How the indigenous knowledges you grew up with are so often not deemed worthy of real scientific engagement. How the invisible statues all around the university continue to cast their shadows over you. How your high school science teacher once humiliated you in front of the entire class. A thousand thoughts are racing around in your head. You begin to speak and at first the words flow, passionate and articulate, and people listen. But there is so much righteous indignation, so much legitimate rage and frustration in you — three weeks of police batons and stun grenades, 18 months of activist fatigue and 20+ years of being on the receiving end of white supremacy — that you start to become polemical. Your statements become more sweeping. Before you know it, you’re calling for all of science to be eradicated. It’s not quite the epistemological point you were trying to make, but now you’ve said it and you can’t back down. After a couple of minutes you stop, shaking with passion and barely holding yourself back from calling for parliament to be set alight.
A short while later, you learn that someone has shared a three minute video clip of your diatribe against all of science and Western reason on Youtube. You’ve already forgotten what you said, although you remember that it didn’t come out quite as you planned, and so you’re a little nervous as you click the link.
The video has received almost half a million views. It has been shared countless times and there are even some news articles about it. Nobody has understood your point, although you expected that. Very few people even understand that it was part of a longer conversation. That this was a group of people expressing opinions about how best to change an unjust system. That you are not the voice of #FeesMustFall. That this is not a manifesto — it’s just you thinking out loud, trying to make a complex point and failing a little at it.
It’s the comments under the video that hurt you the most. From the safety of anonymity, people have laughed at you. Ridiculed and humiliated you. Called you an idiot. An aggressive asshole. Far, far worse things. On Facebook and Twitter it’s the same, except you can now see their faces. Their jeering white faces. Their male gaze. Their smug paternalism. Their ugliness. You’re not new to this look, but now it’s everywhere all at once. A hundred thousand pairs of judging eyes, all projecting their fear and hatred and bigotry onto you. Scapegoating you. You are now all of #FeesMustFall. You are decolonization. You are Manto Tshabalala-Msimang. You are the void into which all science and reason fall. You are blackness.
And you consider what to do, whether you should dig in your heels and fight back or simply slink away silently, ashamed and humiliated. And in this moment you wonder why it surprises anyone that the air is full of stones and smoke and tear gas.