Sarah Tuttle explains to Justice Roberts what unique perspective a minority student brings to a physics class.

I am a white woman about to start a faculty position in astronomy at the University of Washington, Seattle. Justice John Roberts wants to know why I would care who was in my class. Although I find it baffling that a man who leads the court of a country built in an attempt to honor and value those disparate experiences and backgrounds doesn’t understand the strength of that diversity, I will do him the service I do for all of my students. I will assume that his intentions are good and explain to him why his question is easy to answer, if only he spent any time thinking about it.

Her explanation is a thing of beauty. Read it all; here’s just a taste:

I care who is in my class because I’m training revolutionaries. Revolutions come not from walking down the well trodden path, but from finding new paths. How does that happen? The act of physics is an act of rigorous creativity. Our creativity flows not from the set of equations we drape over the top, but from our personal experiences and knowledge of what comes before. New ways of thinking come from daydreaming, and pushing the limits of what we think we understand. If I am not putting those tools of knowledge into a broad range of hands, I’m failing our next generation.

She asks herself why are her classes so white.

John Roberts doesn’t want us to ask these questions because the underlying reason is ugly and exposes the systemic racism that is institutionalized at the deepest levels of our society. The laws that John Roberts and his colleagues nominally clarify and protect are created to keep Justices Roberts, Scalia, and their ilk of mediocre white men at the helm of our country. This is particularly ironic because our Justice seems to require minority students to justify their existence in any classroom they might wish to join. Since when is access to education something that must be earned through demonstrated greatness? For those of us that are white, seats at the table have always been available for the mediocre.

That’s one good definition of privilege: seats at the table for the mediocre.

H/t Jen