Black Women Can’t Do Physics As Well As White Men, Says Researcher

Think about how great physics can become, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (what a perfect name) asks us, if black women can be made to think like White men. She goes on and on about this, and on some more, in her peer-reviewed paper “Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism: The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.

It’s been tried before, she relates, but the results so far have not been promising. Says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein:

Through the recognition of white empiricism, a bifurcated logic that serves white supremacist traditions in science while deontologizing marginalized Black women physicists, I propose that the Black feminist theory intersectionality should change physics—and not just through who becomes a physicist but through the actual outcomes of what we come to know. 

Now you might see this is as yet another example genuine academic gibberish. And this was only a short passage with seemingly some 70,000 more words just like it. But I read it and found gold.

Her gist seems to be that whites have been so successful in physics—discovering almost all things, deriving the most profound insights, producing a wealth of knowledge, and, though its cliche, changing the world—that she was forced to invent the term White empiricism to describe these seemingly endless triumphs.

Having been told I’m White myself, and recalling my my own meager share to the stockpile of discovery, I thank her for this. Mighty White of her, as we used to say.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein says “White empiricism is one of the mechanisms by which this [prestige] asymmetry follows Black women physicists into their professional lives.” Those are her italics, by the way. She really knows how to make a guy blush. I mean, I knew Whites were good, which is why you see so many of them in physics and other fields of intellectual endeavor, all of which are top heavy with White men, to say the least. But flattery like “prestige” is a little embarrassing. She meant well, I’m sure, but a simple “Thank you” would have been sufficient.

I’m not sure what she knows about black women, but it must be that she thought they wouldn’t have been able to do physics as well as the White guys until they learned to think like them. She’sblunt in her assessment: “[W]hite supremacy in physics produces [b]lack physicists as a permanent ontological Other.” Harsh and seemingly with a finality that will be difficult for some to accept.

Her outlook is somewhat bleak:

The experiences of [b]lack scientists in professional physics can be described by frameworks developed in the field of social epistemology: epistemic injustice, epistemic oppression, and conceptual competence injustice.

Now I know black women haven’t contributed much to physics, but to call their efforts “epistemic injustice” is brutal. Calling out Nature creating “conceptual competence injustice” will smack of “racism” to many. But that, I insist, is the wrong notion. People cannot be faulted for lacking intellectual ability. It is no sin, so to speak, to be born short. You are or aren’t tall and have to deal with what you have. It follows there is no point crowing about being naturally tall, intellectually speaking. At best it is boorish.

Feminists do not escape her penetrating criticims. Look, if you dare, what Chanda Prescod-Weinstein says about feminists:

[A]lthough there has been some scholarship on feminist theory and physics, it seems the primary feminist epistemology axiom has been that physics is unusual because the laws that underlie it are universal and not determined by people. 

We can dispute what we mean by “laws“, but the sentiment is exactly right. Physics aims to find how Nature works, while not depending on the vicissitudes of culture. It takes a brave woman to criticize one of her own, and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein will surely catch Hell from feminists about this. But she is right to point out feminists are crazy. We owe her our support.

The good news is that, even if our own optimism flags, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein retains hers cheerfulness about black women. Go back and read her title again. It is no accident she began with “Making”. She knows that if black woman can be made to think like White men, embrace their epistemological attitudes as it were, we might somebody be able to say not “White supremacy” in physics, but “White & black supremacy”.

She says all that because “General Relativity implies that there is no hierarchy of observers” thus—and this really is her inference—“Standpoint theory correctly identifies that there are contexts in which [b]lack women are epistemically privileged observers”.

You bet there are.

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