Our mole inside Queers-for-Palestine Brown University signed up for Linear Algebra and was sentenced to read “Mathematical Microaggressions” by a past president of the Mathematical Association of America, Francis Edward Su. He/she/ze/they starts off by relating his/her/zir/their own personal trauma:
Here are some example microaggressions in the math world:
Turning tricks is somehow bad:
Math will be improved with more diversity:
Here’s the organization’s current “Executive Director” (“president” wasn’t a sufficiently august title?):
They’re so certain that diversity improves mathematics that they hired one of the world’s whitest white guys to be their leader?
Not shying away from controversy, the organization took a brave stand against murder in 2021 with “Committee on Minority Participation in Mathematics Statement in Support of our Asian and Asian American Community Members”:
On March 16, 2021 a man killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent, and injured one man in a shooting spree in Atlanta, Georgia. This violence has renewed broader calls to support our Asian and Asian American communities. The specifics of this tragic incident remind us that there are multiple layers of identity-based marginalization and hate related to gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality. One solidarity movement with the victims of the hate crime is #StopAsianHate. This is not a response to last Tuesday’s events, but to a broader arc of increased hate crime since the COVID-19 pandemic started.
(Maybe hate crime has come back down thanks to hate-free leadership by Biden-Harris? The FBI says it went up between 2022 and 2023:
But the U.S. population grew dramatically over the same period due to the open border. So perhaps hate crime has gone down on a per capita basis. Nobody can know because nobody can accurately estimate the number of undocumented migrants who are our guests.)
What else do these university-affiliated folks do with the fat overhead payments that NSF has been giving them? “2021 Award Winner Announced for MAA’s Inclusivity Award”:
In 2019, MAA launched the Inclusivity Award in recognition of the importance of its core value of Inclusivity and building a healthy, vibrant mathematical community where all are welcome and encouraged to flourish. The 2021 award winner is William (Bill) Hawkins, Jr.
UnderDr. Hawkins’s leadership, the SUMMA Office created an archival record of American PhDs in mathematics and mathematics education who are members of minority groups, initiated the Minority Chairs Breakfast annually, established the Tensor-SUMMA projects “to encourage the pursuit and enjoyment of mathematics by students who are members of groups historically underrepresented in the field of mathematics,” organized panels at JMM on issues that affected minority institutions or populations, published a poster on African and African-American Pioneers in Mathematics, and provided guidance to those who wanted to establish an intervention project.
“I am delighted to be able to recognize my friend and colleague, Bill Hawkins, with the 2021 Inclusivity Award,” said MAA Executive Director, Michael Pearson. “It has been my privilege to work with, and learn from, Bill during my tenure at MAA.”
Circling back to Clouseau, let’s hope that he can learn some linear algebra from YouTube while the Brown faculty teaches him about microaggressions (a $91,676/year experience for 2024-5).
Related:
When I was young and stupid, I wanted to rid myself of accent. It’s one hell of an effort for an adult, even if one had an ear for music and I didn’t. So, I started to affect the RP. Naturally, a Brit most likely would figure my ruse right away, but with most corporate Americans, massively infected with an inferiority complex vis-a-vis British aristocracy, it worked wonders.
Now, I realize that I was engaging in frightful microaggression against the natives!
By the way, I understood pretty soon that impersonating myself was much more fun and I would often aggravate my Russian accent, reverberating rolled-Rs – now, that’s unprovoked mAcroagression, I guess..
Linear algebra: a very easy class yet forget about asking a lion to develop a matrix that transforms coordinates or computes kalman filters. Fortunately, AI can do this nowadays.