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I didn't have space for all the telling stories & insights shared with me by those I interviewed for my story on the mathematician Edray Goins and the type of racism among academics that by its nature goes mostly undocumented. nytimes.com/2019/02/18/us/… Here are some I left out.
A favorite quote of readers (and of mine) that WAS in the story came from Nate Whitaker, head of the department of math and statistics at U-Mass, Amherst: “Who do they make eye contact with? Not you.'' But he went on:
"And then when they do that, you feel very measured in what you say. Because you feel like you have to say the right thing, every time you speak.'' (It was really hard for me to cut that brutal truth out of the quote so plz RT it widely).
I met Dr. Whitaker @JointMath, the big annual meeting of mathematicians, which was in Baltimore last month. I was following around @edraygoins, and talking with other mathematicians. As familiar as it may seem to some, I had to be sure Edray's experience was not anomalous.
Every one of the dozen-plus black mathematicians I spoke to in Baltimore and by phone or email had similar stories of the type of subtle/unconscious/'microaggressive' racial bias he had experienced. As I fumbled with what to call it, some supplied their own labels.
Alfred Noel, of U-Mass, Boston, called it "the racism of educated people.'' Dr. Noel, born and educated in Haiti, speaks perfect French. Once, a white colleague suggested he might not understand an academic paper written in French, because his French was not "Parisian French.''
Craig Sutton, of Dartmouth, called it "Racism 2.0,'' defined as distinct from hate crimes, racial slurs, wearing blackface, etc by "the veneer of politeness that makes it harder to call out."
But Dr. Sutton also cautioned me not to buy too much into ''unconscious bias' as the reason universities are not incorporating black and Latinx academics into their faculty: "a non-trivial number of our colleagues are actively hostile towards the concept."
Kevin Corlette, chair of the math department at the University of Chicago, said 80% of people he meets think he's white. But as a post-doctoral fellow, he was button-holed by a white mathematician at a school where he was giving a seminar talk who wanted to know his 'background.'
"Kevin,'' the professor asked, "are you Hispanic?" Upon learning Dr. Corlette's racial pedigree, the man, a self-identified liberal, proceeded to inform him at length of the downside of affirmative action.
Danny Krashen of Rutgers told me of the strategies he's devised for the visiting lectures where he senses racially-driven skepticism of his competence. They include breaking things down into unnecessary detail, exuding confidence and smiling to make everyone feel comfortable.
Some would only agree to tell their stories off the record, because aving them published could risk careers and peer relationships. One involved a type of offense I agreed to describe only in general terms:
Essentially, it's white people advising other white people not to say racist shit on the internet not because it's racist shit but because "it could hurt your career.'' The example I was given made me feel what was expressed in this response to the story:
There's some more. Maybe I'll keep emptying my notebook here later.
Many gave examples of a presumption of professional incompetence. But there was another category that was in a way more chilling, involving the flexing of bureaucratic power. The setting is refined, the stakes seemingly low, but they evoked for me the ugliest of racial dynamics.
In one of these, a white mathematician had asked a black mathematician to send him a list of times within the week that he was available to meet. Both had tenure, but the white one was in a senior position. After sending the list, the black professor received a reply.
The white mathematician had consulted a department calendar that included every professor’s class schedule, he informed his colleague, and discovered that the black mathematician had failed to include on the list a period when he was indeed free.
In his reply, the black mathematician noted that the white mathematician had consulted the next semester's schedule, not the current one. So he was not, in fact, free during that time slot.
Perhaps it was the kind of move a senior colleague might pull on any junior one. But was it? Would the senior colleague have had the audacity to issue such an implied accusation of dishonesty to a white colleague?
Or, if a white colleague had omitted a time-slot, even if it was for reason of his own personal convenience, would have been seen as his right to do so? Of course, as in so many of these interactions, the black mathematician could never really know if race played a role.
But I’ll just say that this is someone who was not likely to jump to that conclusion. And in this instance, he felt that it did.
The worst examples relate to hiring, or rather not hiring, black faculty candidates. Some of this is in the story: "The ethos characterized as meritocracy...is often wielded as a seemingly unassailable excuse for screening out promising minority job candidates."
But even with unlimited space, I don't know that I could have captured what I think is fair to call the rage and despair of many of the black mathematicians I spoke to over the lack of urgency their white and Asian colleagues feel about correcting the racial imbalance.
It's not just that, when push comes to shove, they don't act on the values of racial diversity they claim to espouse. It's that invoking criteria that happen to screen out all the black candidates is felt as a slap in the face to the few already present on the faculty.
Several told me about hiring committees they sat on in which black candidates whom they championed were never seriously considered. And there is no accountability for the faculty and administrators who make these decisions.
One black mathematician recounted seeing, at their kids' soccer practice, the dean who has the power to say yay or nay to a department's hiring decision, after the white candidate had been hired. What could he say, really?
He ran through it in his mind: "If this really is an institutional priority you have levers that you could push and pull, but it appears that you choose not to.'' he could have said. But there, in that setting? I found the image chilling, in a banality-of-evil kind of way.
I spoke to white and Asian math faculty for this story too. They say they DO care about diversity, the problem is the pipeline. And there is, it is true, a huge problem with the pipeline.... [I'll try to finish this thread later...]
