Recently, professor and mathematics educator Dr. Rochelle Gutiérrez became a center of controversy when right-wing sites wrote pieces about her scholarship provocation to the mathematics community (I’m not linking those). Essentially, she believes — and rightly so — that mathematics pedagogy privileges whiteness. The swamp converged onto her e-mail and social media. Most of the retorts pull from the alt-right playbook, calling her “girl” / “honey” and telling her to “speak English.” For the purposes of my sanity, I’d like to hone in on two arguments:
- mathematics is either neutral from issues of race, class, and gender and
- we don’t need to worry about race because the word “algebra” is Arabic, so whiteness isn’t at the center
[Side note, but not really: it’s worth noting that plenty of organizations have come out with statements in support of Gutiérrez in her scholarship. We also need to outright rebuke racist, sexist, classist, and xenophobic attacks on her person, as we can’t separate the person and the work she does insofar as the insults and yellow journalism are concerned. Let’s please address both.]
It’s important for us as a country to recognize the benign ways we approach teaching stories as a whole. As youth, we’re indoctrinated with histories and pedagogies that suggest that the teacher and this country has it all…
