by Andrew Sun
All the time, I uncover the folds and creases of my identity and positionality as an Asian American.
There exist nuances of my identity I am proud to display. They include the shared sanctity of hotpot and dimsum, the student cultural showcases of music and art and dance, and the shared immigrant backstory, the marathon toward generational stability. I am proud to sit in and struggle against the history of Asian American oppression, from Japanese internment, to the Chinese Exclusion Act, to modern-day anti-Asian vitriol and hate.
Often framed as a meme or joke, there is a personal aspect of my identity in which I do not feel overwhelming pride: the overabundance of Asian and Asian American men in mathematics classrooms, and the exclusive and inequitable environment it often creates for others. In March, I used the phenomenon as fodder to receive funding to visit Seattle, simultaneously an active battleground for an ethnic studies infusion in math, and a haven for the pan-Asian community. My transformational trip at the beginning of April cosigns, alongside what I have learned in class, the critique I present against mathematics as it currently conceptualized, especially in the US.
It behooves me, though, to start with a vignette of those proximate to the problem — because as an Asian American man in college mathematics, I exist as far from the problem as possible.
Shraddha stumbled into the dimly lit Chinatown restaurant, loosened up by the teachers-only happy hour. The Friday before Spring Break deserved its own celebration, the beginning of a respite from an exhausting yet liberating job: teaching students about the power dynamics and oppressive tacts that shapes mathematics as we understand it today.
“Hi I don’t know your name. What are we even talking about again?”
The conversation that followed jarred me more than most, half a drunken rant and half a genius at work (maybe both were true). Shraddha and the other two folks (all people of color) I ate with were all part of a non-profit to infuse Seattle’s public school district with an ethnic studies lens; they had beforehand worked within the system, before being unceremoniously ousted as white parents realized the danger to their positionality as power brokers of society. I sensed from my hosts anger and disdain that, as a personal beneficiary of the system of mathematics education, felt incomprehensible until I considered my epistemic limitations.
The immediately preceding conversation exacerbated my disillusionment. I had conversed in a posh coffee shop with a white lady, Tracy, who also sought to make mathematics more inclusive, through the opening of an interactive math museum. She balked a bit when asked about the group I was to then eat dinner with, before diplomatically praising their efforts to “disrupt” the exclusive mathematics education of Seattle’s district. I recall feeling relatively inspired and satisfied by all but this one tidbit.
The ensuing dinner would completely blow up this one inconsistency. When I asked Shraddha about Tracy, she did not hold back, bashing her advocacy as entirely insufficient, using a lot of swear words that I won’t quote. She clarified for me the distinction between their efforts: Tracy was book-educated about the historical westernization and ethnic cleansing of math, but did not believe that students should be taught of these disparities — it becomes the goal of the educator, then, to provide inclusive teaching to connect everyone’s mathematical journey to the real world, the world that they’ve lived. To Shraddha, such connection is not possible without the students’ candid understanding of the oppression and power dynamics to shape the mathematics that we understand today. Her education included her lived experience.
The end of that day left me jarred precisely because I felt more comfortable during my conversation with Tracy than with Shraddha. I struggled against the realization that much of my discomfort with Shraddha came about because of her lack of professionalism, a standard that in the larger context of her work to liberate those left out of accessing mathematics entirely, felt completely trivial. My comfort with Tracy reflected my privilege.
To both groups, I asked the question: “What can I do as an Asian American man in math, part of an overrepresented group, to contribute to change?” The critique I present is one piece of what is hopefully a much larger contribution to the overlap between the knowledge project of postcolonialism and decolonialism, and the justice project of ethnic studies in math. Against the constraints of the privilege of my identity, I attempt to roleplay and embrace the more radical vision Shraddha champions, that being to investigate the ways in which colonial mathematics folds into the present.
Principally, mathematics is characterized as the ultimate form of objective, unshakable truth to justify the exploitative intentionalities of the colonizers. I will first contextualize such an argument with its predecessors in the social sciences and natural sciences, before arguing for the argument’s extension to an ostensibly more rigorous field in mathematics, where logical proof justifies any and all assumptions as its mechanism of objectivity.
Social science as a field faces much criticism for attempting to utilize the same methodologies as the natural sciences, despite the inherent variability of human behavior as opposed to natural and biological processes (Drum 2012). Namely, natural and biological phenomena are more structurally consistent and “modelable” than their social counterparts; in some sense, much of humanity is scarred by its utter insanity.
Even so, social science, in carrying the label “science,” has allowed it to assume an inappropriate level of power, empowering colonizers to mask manipulative intentionality with objectivity. In addition, social science has been granted by societal systems (be it economic, cultural, or otherwise) a certain universality that effectively constitutes colonization of the imagination: “By admitting the existence of a universal process (modernity, capitalism, globalization) and of forces that, when all is said and done, underlie it (the forces of nature, the material, the technological, the economic), these ways of thinking again and again handed over to the systematizing forms of social science a territory and a logic they would never so easily have been able to establish” (Mitchell 2002: 2).
Concurrently with social science, more “scientific” science also falls prey to the fallacy of objectivity as a motif of the colonizer. Despite science’s obsession with the scientific method, it is not difficult to conspicuously assemble any collection of scientific data into a self-serving and othering narrative.
Most perniciously, the power-brokers in society have repeatedly developed arbitrary and convenient formulas, masked as scientific definitions, to characterize identity. According to Nazism’s best and brightest scientists, the width of a German nose is casually indicative of their ethnicity, a convenient proxy for ethnic cleansing (Skibba 2019). According to America’s most esteemed scholars of science (I’m being sarcastic here), the percentage of tribal blood should formulaically determine tribal affilitation and recognition status in the United States (Chow 2018). The intention is clear: arbitrary limitations to citizenship as a precursor to indigenous genocide, masked by the authoritarianism of objective, immutable “science” (Chow 2018).
Underlying these socially scientific and biologically scientific methodologies, however, is the language of mathematics and its “objectivity.” How can it be that mathematics can be co-opted to the language of colonialism, when mathematics exists as its own discrete set of rules, guided only by logic and not politics?
These are the refrains and talking points that right-wing pundits like Tucker Carlson propagate, no better captured than by the response to Shraddha’s group: “2+2 = 4, but if the student says 5, you better not correct them, oppressor, because Seattle math is racist” (Rantz 2019).
Much of mathematics rests on objective axioms such as addition and subtraction, and so the example seems to refute the premise of math as a technology of rule. However, many more counting systems exist than the Europeanized system: for instance, the Amazon’s Arara tribe speak of numbers only as combinations of “1” and “2” rather than the 10 basic numbers that our westernized system utilizes (Macdonald 2017). Even as computers rely on the same binary system of computation, one of the most technologically advanced innovations of our times is never framed in terms of the contributions of indigenous and aboriginal counting systems. The marketplace of systems that led to the eventual “universal” counting systems that we refer to today have nothing to do with the validity of each system, but more so to do with the money, influence, and power that undergirds each one.
More importantly, a crucial component of mathematics, mathematical modeling, relies on the principle that making effective (and oftentimes, strong) assumptions about the world that we live in allows us to recharacterize said world in useful mathematical constructs. In other words, models make no claims about solving real-life problems, only their simplified counterparts. Yet the power-brokers of our times and times past abuse these models by granting them the power that they do not deserve.
Grading, a subject often mentioned in class, suffices as an example. Grades take the complicated, nuanced experience of learning in a classroom and reduces said experience to a one-dimensional measurement: a number between 0 and 100. As we have discussed, the model of grades is replete with faulty and strong assumptions about the aspects of learning that ought to be emphasized the most (eg. tests), ahead of arguably more generative modes of education, as well as de-emphasizing the effect of circumstances outside the classroom on in-classroom achievement (Jacob 2018). IQ tests and literacy tests for Black American are two especially pernicious examples of the grading model, as they are co-opted by the oppressor to push out marginalized communities under the fantasy of a complete meritocracy (Reddy 2008: 668).
As hinted before, mathematics becomes especially vulnerable is in its articulation and communication, especially in the context of the colonialisms whose creases remain as marks in the political systems of today. It is not hard to imagine that the politicians of the United States are, on the whole, not very statistically literate, and so such illiteracy, in concert with malicious intent, smears the set-in-stone assumptions that premise statistical results. Take a well-cited statistic in support of the Trump travel ban for Muslims: “70% of immigrants who are identified as terrorists are from predominantly Muslim countries” (Boven 2020). Such a statement cleverly frames away the reality that the vast majority of Muslim immigrants are not terrorists, and so there exists no rational justification to look at the entire pool of Muslim immigrants when screening for terrorists (Boven 2020).
In essense, not only are the “truths” present in mathematics a product of power, influence, and money, but they are also misrepresented and mischaracterized by those with power in society to justify the age-old premise of colonial difference.
In a well-oiled democracy, blatant misuse and abuse of mathematics is theoretically suspect to the checks of the journalistic and the legal system, as well as the public more broadly. However, public resistance is dependent on public knowledge. As such, mathematics has been gatekept as a subject to abuse in all the ways that I just described.
Arturo Escobar comments on a similar logic inherent to other technologies of rule, yet leaves out mathematics as one of those technologies: “Many technologies or “tools” based on specialized knowledge . . surpassed their thresholds sometime in the early to mid-twentieth century. Once these thresholds were passed, the technologies became . . profoundly destructive in material and cultural terms . . . The concentration of power, energy, and technical knowledge in bureaucracies (the State) resulted in the institutionalization of these tools and enabled a tight system of control over production and destruction” (Escobar 2018: 8).
To extrapolate from the machinery of Escobar’s argument, mathematics education assumes that mathematics exists as disembodied knowledge (eg. “I am not a math person”) — that it is a set of axioms, propositions, and theorems that can be memorized by anyone. Framing mathematics in such a manner sounds familiar to anyone who has taken a mathematics course on the K-12 level, with an emphasis on memorization and formulas.
That mathematics exists relationally and accessibly to any student as embodied knowledge, regardless of their perceived mathematical ability, seems radical, yet it is the center of new waves of research and innovation in the pedagogy of mathematics. Active environmental interaction helps students learn mathematics more sustainably, which serves as the basic inspiration for Tracy’s proposed math museum (Alberto 2022: 2). In addition, diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in mathematics departments across the country have identified that more conscious teachers assist in everyone’s learning (Shifrer 2023). In math classrooms just as in any classroom, more internal diversity creates a collective upward achievement effect (Wells 2016).
When phrased innocuously as a matter of “accessibility,” mathematics education reform seems more palatable (as it certainly did to me, hearing from Tracy) because it feels lsess threatening to the powers-that-be. As soon as such reform adopts the frames of “equity” and “liberation,” as they did in the case of the Seattle public school district, the reaction becomes much more severe. Shraddha and one of the other folks I ate with that night brought one of their male friends to dinner, revealing to me by its conclusion that they did so as a form of protection. They were fearful to discuss their knowledge and agenda for liberation with a stranger because of the countless death threats they have received, not to mention their ousting from seats of power from within the district.
Knowledge and literacy of mathematics and statistics for the colonized and oppressed in particular is upsetting to the colonizer force because it empowers these communities to pull the levers of democracy and credibly call BS to mathematical abuse as justification for colonization. Even more dangerous is the explicit teaching of the system of mathematics as oppression at work, which differentiates Tracy and her math museum and Shraddha and her ethnic studies curriculum, prompting the disparate public reaction they’ve received in Seattle — Tracy with positivity and celebration, and Shraddha with doxxing and death threats.
Take a piece of paper and crease it. Your best efforts will not erase the mark that crease leaves behind. It can, however, lesson that mark over time, with intentionality and purpose.
Some of the creases of my positionality I want to do away with. I sense that a plurality of my Asian friends in math classes have no interest in talking about politics and liberation and critique, and they would rather live in the simple, beautiful world that math has created for them to inhabit. And I don’t blame them.
As colonialism folds and unfolds and reconfigures itself into different phenomena of oppression and power and influence, mathematics by no means has been left unmarked. It is the subaltern who speak on this matter, for whom these marks appear as scars on their spirit, and for whom the stories behind the statistics of liberation are especially raw.
I will never live their experience, but the slow and steady work of uncreasing liberates me as it liberates them.
Bibliography
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