I had a quick look through that document McWhorter is criticising, which interested me as it is about education.
Honestly, I struggle to support McWhorter's viewpoint. There are measures in that document with obvious aim at improving black pupils' interest in maths, and certain pedagogic concepts, some of which are well established. I think there is an element of validity in questioning whether a lot of the pedagogic ideas will effectively combat racism, which is perhaps the best line of criticism: I don't see how they would at face value myself either, but it is perhaps defended by one of the sources cited by the document. Unfortunately, instead I feel McWhorter decides to shoot straw men in a barrel.
I read through the whole thing.
If we take the document as a statement that students will learn maths in different ways, then yes, that's true. For instance, it draws attention to the fact that some students will prefer to work in groups rather than alone. But that isn't what the document is about. It starts off with the broadest definition of white supremacy as possible (including, but not limited to, "worship of the written word," which I'm sure will come as a surprise for every other culture on Earth that developed writing systems long before Europe did), and ends with your social justice linguo such as "This reinforces notions of either/or thinking because math is only seen as useful when it is in a particular context. However, this can result in using mathematics to uphold capitalist and imperialist ways of being and understandings
of the world. However, this can result in using mathematics to uphold capitalist and imperialist ways of being and understandings of the world." Because, again, math has NEVER been used in a purely abstract form, and was NEVER used before the development of capitalism, and imperialism of course ISN'T a practice as old as civilization.
It's one thing to suggest that there's different ways to teach maths, and be responsive to students' need, but it's another to racialize it. Who knew that places like China, India, and Arabia were drenched with white supremacy? I mean, going by an OECD report in 2015, here's the top 'mathamatical countries' in the world:
1. Singapore
2. Hong Kong
3. South Korea
4. Japan (tie)
4. Taiwan (tie)
6. Finland
7. Estonia
8. Switzerland
9. Netherlands
10. Canada
So...apparently the white supremacists of the world are Asian, and the European white supremacists are those who, apart from Canada, have had nothing to do with actual white supremacy. Huh. 0_0
Really, looking through the thing, it's drenched with the SoJus linguo that might sound woke, but is unlikely to actually help in the classroom.
For instance, take the argument that the "right" answer is favoured over understanding of concepts and reasoning. This is portrayed by McWhorter as "precision" or "doing the math" (as he calls it) being considered racist by this document, as if blacks can't or shouldn't have to do it. But hang on - what happens if someone understands the concepts and applies the right reasoning to a problem? Surely they get the right answer, don't they?
Most of the time, yes. You might have some confusion as to whether you're using certain methods (e.g. BODMAS vs. PODMAS), but maths tends to have pretty exact answers. It's far easier to evaluate maths then something like English.
So what's going on here? Let's imagine a maths problem where a student has to solve a mathematical problem. The student does everything right except accidentally flubbing a decimal point. We could just give them zero for a wrong answer. But we could also give them 50%, 75%, 90% of the marks available for the bits they got right, even if the final answer was wrong. So, maybe we can see things the documents' authors might mean when they say there is too much emphasis on a "right" answer: we're not giving credit where credit may be due.
From "lived experience," (another term that wound its way into the document), I can attest that when I did maths, we could gain or lose marks depending on what you show. Like, if I had to answer, "what's 9.3 + 6.2?", I would have to show my working (one mark), get the answer right (one mark), and might lose half a mark if I wrote 155 rather than 15.5). Again, though, not sure what that has to do with ethnicity. I mean, I can attest that I noticed two things in school. First, people of Chinese heritage tended to do better, on average, than Euro-Australians. The second, those kids studied like hell. This is of course generalizing, plenty of exceptions, including in my own personal circle of friends, but there's an emphasis on academic excellence in East Asian culture that isn't really found in the West. That explains why people of such heritage tend to knock it out of the park in academic fields. There was a joke I recently heard from an Asian Australian who stated that (paraphrased) "we have three courses in life - be a lawyer, be a doctor, or be disowned." And, well, when people claim Google has a "white supremacist" culture, despite the most common surname in Google being Singh, then you get some really weird mental contortions.
