Black students come to the physics classroom for the same reason white students do
Jedidah C. Isler sets Scalia and Roberts straight on some things.
The truly damaging part of Chief Justice Roberts’s question is the tacit implication that black students must justify their presence at all.
Black students’ responsibility in the classroom is not to serve as “seasoning” to the academic soup. They do not function primarily to enrich the learning experience of white students. Black students come to the physics classroom for the same reason white students do; they love physics and want to know more. Do we require that white students justify their presence in the classroom? Do we need them to bring something other than their interest?
No, we don’t, and you know what that does? It frees up white students to learn and do physics. (The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to people from other categories that are expected to justify their presence in the classroom.)
By suggesting, and sadly litigating, that diversity — and more important, inclusion and equal opportunity — aren’t paramount to the production of new scientific information, we wrongly imply that the most important part of scientific discovery is in the classroom.
The purpose of the classroom is to build a tool kit and to understand what we know in the hopes of uncovering something that we don’t. It’s the door through which we create new physicists. Closing that door to students of color unless they can justify their presence is closing the door to the kinds of creativity that can be shown only after a student has mastered basic skills.
A physics class should interrogate and transfer the canon of scientific knowledge. Those students will go on to consider the many unanswered questions at the frontiers of what is known about the universe.
If we limit the physics classroom to white students, or students whose presence in a classroom we leave unquestioned, we also limit the production of new information about the world — and whose perspective that world will reflect. If that’s the case, then we all lose.
So let’s don’t do that.
When I was in Texas, the divide between the money spent on educating minorities and educating the white citizens was notable. I had students of color in my classroom who struggled to keep up because they had less preparation. This fed into the preconception of people who assumed they were not as smart. Because they had less opportunity earlier in life, they came to college with less preparation, therefore they typically did worse (especially at first) than white students. Ergo, they were less capable by nature.
I tried to point this out to a number of people, but a person who already has this mindset simply has no desire to listen. And a lot of people who do not think they are prejudiced, well, it turns out they aren’t able to listen, either. They tell you, “well, I always thought there was equality of the races, but I have to look at it rationally, and what I see in my classes shows me otherwise”. I suspect that they always had some belief that there was a difference, but wouldn’t admit it even to themselves because it felt bad to them. They were giving themselves permission to believe they were superior, and they weren’t going to hear otherwise now.
Sometimes it required a little extra work on my part when teaching a student from a poorer school, usually a person of color, and for a lot of people, that proved their prejudice. It never occurred to them that this was the work that had been done with the other students earlier on in life, and being three steps behind everyone else meant it was an amazing feat when the students finished even.
That’s such an important point.
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