What isn’t racist these day? I almost ate a sandwich on white bread yesterday, then I realized I was being put down by the man. So then I made one on whole wheat, and realized that I was appropriating someone else’s culture. Not really. I don’t buy into all of that crap.

But Oregon does.

The Oregon Department of Education (ODE) recently encouraged teachers to register for training that encourages “ethnomathematics” and argues, among other things, that White supremacy manifests itself in the focus on finding the right answer.

So is the answer racist? Or is it just “finding” the right answer.  I can’t answer that, but there are some things that are true or false:

“The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so,” the document for the “Equitable Math” toolkit reads. “Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.”

There is so much stupid in this article it is hard to catch it all. I wonder if this is just another attempt to give everyone a trophy even if they suck like little league does these day, or if they are serious.

I think we all know where this is really going though:

It also encourages teachers to “center ethnomathematics,” which includes a variety of guidelines. One of them instructs educators to “identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views.”

And there it is. It always ends up with capitalism. Never mind that it has brought more prosperity than any other system in the world. To look at it a little more closely though, isn’t capitalism just another way to say free? If you think about it, it is just a step above bartering. I want your chickens, and you want my green beans. So we trade. What if you want my beans, but I don’t want your chickens. I want one of those fancy 8 track player things that Joe Bob is selling. Ok, lets all settle on something that will have agreed upon value. How it the value agreed on? By its trade. My bushel of green beans is worth one dollar, because that is what I sold it for. Pretty simple.

We can’t have that in a society though. We have to twist ourselves into knots for equity. I am waiting to see how that is going to be defined.

Final question though: Should we require that bridges have signs that say where the engineer who designed them went to school?