Professors Claim ‘Honors’ Math Classes Promote ‘White Supremacy’

A coalition of professors claim in a recent academic paper that honors classes, meritocracy, and colorblindness are all used to perpetuate “white supremacy” in math classes.

The article — “Whiteness and Fear: Backlash to Mathematics Education Reform” — was published in the journal Thresholds, and was penned by three elite university professors, Eric Cordero-Siy, Michael Lolkus, and Frances K. Harper.

Eric Cordero-Siy, the lead author on the paper, claims that mathematics classrooms have long been oppressive spaces for people of color, LGBT people, and women, and that this must be remedied by more social justice pedagogy in the classroom.

Writing this article in a college trade publication, his article reads as a call to action for math teachers to think about how math education was created by white people and how to dismantle the whiteness therein.

“Whiteness is a social construction that maintains white supremacy, the ideology that the white race is superior to others, while simultaneously claiming a sense of delicacy and fragility,” Cordero-Siy argues.

“Mathematics has largely been regarded as value and culture-free, so mathematics classrooms should just ‘be about numbers”... right? No, he argues, because “this ideology [of being just about numbers] aligns with whiteness and white supremacy,” Cordero-Siy says.

In the paper, they go on to blame white students, white professors, and honors classes for the inequities minorities face in academia.

“Mathematics education has long been the site of meritocracy where pervasive discourses of “high” and “low” students (e.g., “honors” and “support” mathematics classes) serve to separate those in the club, with white and white-adjacent students in the club, and everyone else, not. This leads to… the academic delegitimization of non-white… students.”

So — this paper seems to argue — the fact that white and Asian students are overrepresented in honors classes, due to their higher performance on standardized tests, unfairly creates a situation where black and Latino students are ignored or delegitimized.

Further, they conclude that math classes hurt minorities.

“Because mathematics education has always been able to retreat to the adage that mathematics is just about the numbers, our field has been complicit in the violence and harm directed towards the defenseless and the disenfranchised.

“Without confronting and radically reimagining mathematics, we are stuck in a loop where whiteness begets whiteness,” they conclude.

I reached out to the professors to ask how exactly social justice would fix this alleged issue, but did not receive a response. But Frances K. Harper, one of the professors who helped pen the article, wrote a blog post summarizing her feelings on the issue.

“The mathematics that we value, and therefore use to gauge achievement, reflects the viewpoints of the dominant group in our society: i.e. White, middle class, heterosexual male),” Harper writes.

“An overemphasis on access and achievement ignores the fact that the dominant mathematics curriculum is ripe with political, racial and gender bias” Harper adds, echoing her colleague’s negative sentiment on meritocracy.

These professors are not alone in their thinking.

As far back as 2017 and 2018, I’ve reported on a growing coalition of professors securing research grants and publishing articles focused on social justice and DEI in mathematics education. Many of these academics profess a commitment to eliminating “whiteness” in math. How that might be achieved is anyone’s guess.

Toni Airaksinen (@Toni_Airaksinen on X) is a journalist living in Delray Beach, Florida. If you want to stay on top of news regarding college antisemitism, please follow her on Substack, Twitter or Instagram.