Black Professor: "Pay attention to me!"

The Unz Review cites to an a paper by the title "Making Black Women Scientists Under White Empiricism: the Racialization of Epistemology in Physics" by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, an Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Core Faculty Member in Women’s Studies at the University of New Hampshire. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion, and in Prescod-Weinstein's opinion, "despite the universality of the laws that undergird physics,"white men observe the universe differently from black women; that the predominance of white men (both past and present) in physics has been deleterious to physics because of this difference on observation; and that the only way to correct this is to hire more black woman professors. She contends in her paper that the only reason why there are more white men that have Ph.D.s in physics than black women (or black men) is because of racism, and that this is the only acceptable answer for explaining the disparity--that is, other explanations such as fewer black women being interested in physics, fewer black women with the intelligence to do high level math, etc., are not acceptable. Most of the paper is taken up by describing how horrible are white people.

      The paper is almost unreadable because of the contrived pseudo-intellectual language used by gender studies and the constant reminder that the author hates white people. But stripped of this, the author's argument is that (1) other scientists don't pay her the attention she thinks she deserves, and (2) she doesn't get enough access to the really cool toys to which other researchers have access. Que the world's smallest violin.

      What she doesn't understand is that writing this drivel is not going to get her the respect she wants from real scientists--the opposite, in fact--but will only appeal to the hardcore gender and race studies "scholars."