On Wednesday (if I recall the day correctly) Merle posted a message about the #stopSTEM and related calls for academia, especially in the STEM disciplines to reflect on system racism within those fields.
At vFRIAM today the "official" definition of 'racism' and the contrast of official versus vernacular use of the word arose. Lost in the ensuing discussion (at least for me) were important questions about words, the attributes assigned to words, and interpretations of discrete words in different contexts and from different perspectives.
To illustrate:
The movement that Merle referred us to advances several different positions. One would be for academia to reflect on how procedures for tenure, for example, affect people of color differently and impair their opportunities for publication and/or academic advancement. Another position was directed to "content" of STEM courses/texts/discussions. And this gets to my questions about words. Three specific examples:
— engineering texts should be scrubbed and the phrase "master-slave" referring to relationships among components should be removed because it is "racist."
— discussion of advances in quantum computing should not include the phrase "quantum supremacy" because this too is racist / alludes to white supremacy.
— the discipline of statistics needs to be "contextualized" with its racist origins in the eugenics movement in the US in the circa 1920-30s
Not directly part of the current movement, but closely related: "trigger words"
So —
- words are.
- words may have different definitions and only context can inform me as to which definition I should use to comprehend the word.
- words can be overloaded, up to and including using a word to convey the exact opposite of the 'face value' of the word.
- words are often ascribed 'attributes', i.e. this word is racist, sexist, or a "dog whistle"
- some readers/listeners of a word can be 'blinded' by an attribute and the word carrying that attribute becomes invisible
- the context necessary to decipher the 'meaning' / definition of a word is often not explicit, i.e. is not found in the surrounding words, sentences, paragraphs, but is implicit, i.e. in shared culture. This means that people of different cultural backgrounds bring different, invisible, context to the word deciphering process. Hence "trigger words."
There are more, but even this short list severely crimps my logorrhea.
help
davew
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