It now seems that basic math, like history, and pretty much all of reality itself, is racist and reeks of white supremacy.  On Sunday, Breitbart reported that Laurie Rubel, a professor of math education at Brooklyn College, argued on Twitter that 2+2=4 “reeks of white supremacist patriarchy” on Twitter.

Personally, I wasn’t aware that numbers were part of a race, but then again, I graduated college with just a 4.0 GPA, so what do I know, right? Jeff Dunetz double-checked with his son who graduated cum laude with an advanced math degree in June who had never heard that numbers were a racial issue either.

But Ms. Rubel was “retweeted and promoted by several academics at universities and colleges around the nation.”

We were unable to find the tweet on her timeline, but Campus Reform captured it for posterity:

According to Campus Reform:

The debate itself was rooted in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, in which citizens of a fictional totalitarian state believe that 2 plus 2 equals 5 as a result of government propaganda.

Laurie Rubel, who teaches math education at Brooklyn College, says that the idea of math being cultural neutral is a “myth,” and that asking whether 2 plus 2 equals 4 “reeks of white supremacist patriarchy.”

“Y’all must know that the idea that math is objective or neutral IS A MYTH,” she tweeted.

Breitbart said quite a few scholars and academics engaged in the discussion:

Several academics from institutions around the nation chimed in. Harvard Ph.D. candidate Kareem Carr suggested that math should be reevaluated because it was primarily developed by white men.

“People say it’s subjectivism to ask if math is Western. I don’t get that. It’s an objective fact that some groups were more involved in the creation of modern math than others,” Carr said. “They may have been *trying* to make it objective but it’s not stupid to ask if they actually succeeded!”

A few academics have pushed back. James Lindsay, one of the academics behind a series of hoax papers that were published in “social justice” journals, reminded Rubel and her peers that mathematical truths are objective.

“It’s certainly the case, and the Woke need to be held firmly to the point, that feats of engineering like space travel and rocketry utterly depend upon accepting stable meanings of mathematical statements like 2+2=4 as objectively true, not mere accidents of culture,” Lindsay tweeted.

Our response to all of this?  You guessed it:

Indeed.  What concerns us the most is that THIS is what is now indoctrinating our children…

Cross-posted with Conservative Firing Line

2+2=4 white supremacist patriarchy

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