Section 1: "Sorry-not-sorry"
I know sometimes (on this blog and in real-life interactions) I can be prone to using "raw" language. Not only in my usage of curse words, but in my approach to asking questions and questioning existing morality and standards and ethics.. First I'll address the curse word usage, then I'll address the bluntness..
It probably seems counter-intuitive, to most readers, that I would knowingly post blogs with swear words on a site where I'm also trying to actively promote my own academic research. Which is to say, what kind of scholar publishes a post using words like "f__" or "bulls__" next to an academic research paper and expects to be taken seriously? And it's a fair question. I feel it should be noted that I keep my academic work free of swearing (I've never written a research paper about "that m___f___ing geometric lens bulls___"), while I do allow curse words in what I regard as my more personal posts regarding non-academic situations I find myself reflecting upon (eg; racism/sexism/homophobia in education). Even when I'm talking about the educational system, I'm speaking from a personal vantage point (anecdotal) rather than an academic vantage point (meaning approaching "isms" in the educational system as a research project). In my personal life, I do swear. Probably too much. Some of that comes from lack of real human interaction outside of school throughout my life. In general (outside of my research and work), I'm pretty ignorant in terms of language usage. My model at home involved no diplomacy. I was "lazy, stupid, weak, possessed by demons, a failure.." and on and on. These people (my "parents") would have me stand on abortion protest lines waving signs when I was a little kid (about 10-ish years old). I've since grown to realize how horrible that is (I am 100%, proudly pro-choice, and I'm strongly against any restrictive policy that hinders a woman from having access to clinics that preform abortions). But no matter how much i grow ideologically, the fact of the matter is I grew up with abusive, violent, ignorant language surrounding me. Some of that was at school for all of k-12 (and it still existed, to a lesser extent, in colleges & universities I've attended).
The thing is, in all of my dealings with people, I've noticed that no matter how educated someone is, they still tend to use curse words or hateful words to one degree or another. Just a few days ago, I listened to a "normal" looking college kid (male, white, glasses, beatles-type hair, sort of tight pants, faux-vintage sweater, etc.) tell his friend (who also 'fit the description) how "gay" it was that there was a quiz. This was on campus. So my thing is, I'm going to be transparent. I'm not going to be like those kids, who said that but would deny saying things like that to my face if I confronted them today. The "public-face PC" I call it. I swear, I say mean things sometimes, but in general my heart is in the right place (I want justice, equality, and opportunity for EVERYBODY and I want the people who aren't for those things re-educated or gone). When my mind is in the wrong place, I try to right that, and sometimes the inner conflict involved in resolving an issue on a personal level involves harsh language and a raw, direct approach. That's part of being brutally honest, with ones self and others.
The bluntness, or what you might call the extremely direct way of 'calling out' a problem/person is sort of a result of the same situations I discussed above (and in other posts). But to be perfectly honest, it's mostly a result of how I deal with myself. I question everything I do and say. From the most calculated action to the most spontaneous action, I question everything I do and say and I'm really blunt/direct with myself when I'm questioning myself. For instance, right now I question myself daily about where I stand on inequalities in education. Part of me struggles with the idea that maybe I'm mostly upset with things because of the situations and inequalities I've faced in the system from kindergarten to now. Part of me knows that it's not just me because I read accounts of inequalities in academia in many different formats (articles, academic journals, tweets, whatever else they're doing these days).
One thing I know is that I've never really grown as a person, in terms of the way I think, unless I've approached my way of thinking with a brutal honesty. It's one reason why I don't really interact with people much. After being brutally honest with myself a few years ago I realized that my interactions with other people were always so strained (or superficial at best) because I simply didn't know how to interact with people. Of any type. When your parents' & extended familys' primary mode of communicating with you in your youth is sexual abuse, child labour, religious indoctrination and religious based torture (because that's what convincing a child they're demonically possessed is),occasional physical torture, mocking/derisive laughter & comments.... that's not really a strong foundation for learning how to interact in the real world. I always thought that's how everyone grew up, though. I didn't know any different. It's not like things were much better in terms of human interaction in the public school systems I attended. And as a result, all of my human interactions were pretty much doomed from the get go. Especially in terms of my past romantic relationships, I had to be really honest with myself. I had to ask "How can I love a woman so much but never feel like we're connecting on any level, even when we're living together?". And the answer I had to face was, it was me. I didn't know what a human relationship involved, on any level. I did nice/sweet things but I lacked the real understanding of human interaction to be in a relationship. It also meant, when I was honest with myself, that I wasn't really equipped for non-romantic relationships either. That's a hard truth I had to face, and it's a hard truth to have to live with, but that's how it is..
The thing is, if I'm that brutally honest with myself, if I keep it that real with myself, why shouldn't I be that brutally honest with others who I know for a fact are lying to themselves and others via their own tainted views of the world? If a professor says something racist to me, it's my job to be as brutally honest about that as I am about my personal shortcomings. It's not to deride them or demonize them. It's to say, look at yourself, look at the words that came out of your mouth, and be honest with yourself. It's to say, don't go in public with a smiling face calling yourself progressive when you're protecting students who are racist by making your own racist statements. Don't call yourself a progressive PC college student if you're calling everything you don't like "gay" and making racist and/or sexist comments on the regular. Don't call yourself an academic or a researcher if all you know how to do is memorize and regurgitate information, not process and creatively implement information in a way that actually progresses a field of study.
I realize (again,, by being brutally honest with myself) that at age 36 (and some months) I'm probably not going to become the quintessential "public-self, private-self" person that we consider "normal". So many of you are more like Donald Trump than you realize. You can demonize him for his "public/private" duality without realizing you're the same way. You call yourselves "psychological councilors", but you push away people who need real help because they don't fit your description of a human being "worthy" of your help and then you go off and fly your equality flag like you didn't just discriminate against someone (I'm directing that at all the people I've dealt with at CAPS & SHS at Oregon State, not just one specific person). I can apologize for my bluntness, but I'm going to keep being blunt to people who aren't honest about their duality. Be they conservative, liberal, centrist, or fringe. It's a "sorry-not-sorry" cycle.
Section 2: Language and the Racial Context (especially concerning the n-word)
This section is going to be "realtalk only". It's going to be code red on the "sorry-not-sorry" scale. of brutal honesty But it's only going to be that BECAUSE it's honest. When you read the following, keep in mind this comes from years of talking/discussing with people ranging from hardcore African-American NYC 5%ers to hardcore Eurocentric-American MI neo-nazi's and everything in between. It comes from reading books and articles on language (especially AAVE [African American Vernacular English], look it up).
One instance I ran into at OSU was having a student ( maybe not-so-ironically, the same kid who said he hated the "black accent") say 'nigg-AAHHHHHHH' to me on campus in a study room. If you don't remember, 'nigg-AAAAHHHH' is in reference to the white school teacher who thought by changing n----r to n----a, he wasn't being racist. I'm not sure why the student I encountered said that (he just said it, for no reason, in a non-sequitur fashion), but it definitely surprised
me to say the least.
First things first: the n-word is never ok to use. I believe this should be true for everyone. It's a horrible word and it's so deeply rooted in our collective conscious. "N---a" is just the AAVE way of saying "n---r". There is no special, alternate meaning gained by changing the -er to -a. It's the same word. And so the question arises "Why do so many African Americans (and some Puerto Ricans and other People of Colour) use it, then?". What follows is the best answer I can come up with from everything I've read and everything I've heard and discussed.
To start with, everybody in the world has to realize one thing: English was not spoken in non-colonized Africa. People brought to America from Africa did not know how to speak English. At all. And when slaves were brought to America, they weren't given remedial English lessons before their formal enslavement. And none of the slavers in America spoke any African languages. At all. They yelled at slaves & whipped them & prodded them with pokers & shot them or killed them in other ways when they decided they were too frustrated to deal with language barriers. After days and weeks and months and years and decades and centuries of having white men yell "N---R do this!" and "N--r do that!" and all manner of commands beginning with the N-word, it got stuck in the collective dialect of people who were being called "N--r". Before slaves got off a ship, before they knew English on even a rudimentary level, it was beat into their heads that they were called "N--r". In many cases, the n-word was the first word African slaves learned; the "self-identifying" word. For all they knew, the N-word meant "bro" or "dude". I'm sure the context was made more clear over time and after a few extreme-yet-commonplace violations of human rights, but the fact of the matter remains that the N-word was an English word imposed upon a people who didn't speak English and who didn't know any better.
Over the years, after the word was basically integrated into the African American lexicon by being beaten into the lexicon, but not after the end of slavery (keeping in mind, white people did NOT allow education of slaves in even the most rudimentary fashion, so there was for centuries an African American English lexicon and a European-American lexicon that were NOT by any means the same), it was fairly common for slaves to use the N-word as an identifier of self and community for two reasons: an otherwise ignorant understanding of the word due to lack of education, or an understanding of the meaning of the word with an understanding that continuing use of the word helped in feigning ignorance and spared the more enlightened, educated slaves from the over-seer or master's whip (or worse, especially for educated slaves). In may ways, the word still holds over in its usage in the African American community from the slavery era for basically the same two reasons: ignorance or
self-preservation. America still keeps African Americans at arms length (or further) in education, which results in ignorance. America still holds on to the fear of educated African Americans (especially ones who do not accept the invalid theory of white intellectual/academic superiority), which results in self-preservation. So the usage still remains in the lexicon because the same problems still exist. The reason the word, in its "n***a" form, is viewed as just a way of saying "black person" that's not racist is because it's used primarily in an entertainment setting (music, movies, tv, etc). But the thing to realize there is that up until recently (on a relative, social evolutionary scale) African Americans were basically relegated to entertainment jobs (or menial labour jobs, but those aren't 'public eye jobs & aren't particularly relevant to this discussion). Since the word was beaten into the collective African American conscious so long as to become a phrase/identifier used in an unconscious manner, and since entertainment industries aren't exactly filled with the cream of the academic crop for ANY race, it ended up being used in a public setting. For many white people, this was the first time (even in the 90's) that they heard the word used by African Americans to describe African Americans. Most of white America also had no real concept of the "phenomenon" of AAVE, and so they thought "n--a" and "n---er" were actually two different words.
The use of "-a" as a "replacement" from "-er" is a result of the lack of any English lessons for centuries, as stated before (both in this piece and in other works by more insightful individuals who devote careers to studying these types of linguistic phenomena). "-er", as a type of phonetic suffix (?) just didn't appear in most African dialects or languages. Many non-English languages don't have analogues for certain phonetic structures used in English.
I'm not really trying to "go anywhere" or argue any point here, outside of the fact that "n--a" is NOT different from "n--er", and that the understanding of it's continued usage in African American culture is entirely dependent on the context of centuries of slavery, centuries of people being forced to be uneducated on an even basic level, and the (continued) veneration of the "entertaining African American" over the educated African American. The only conclusion I want to result from those main points is that ANY usage of the N-word, no matter what letter(s) it ends with, should be used. I'm nowhere near the 1st person to talk about this, and I won't be the last. I DO think, and I DO hope, that this might reach some people who are sequestered in the academic world (especially the hard-sciences) and whose only understanding of AAVE and its history comes from the occasional movie and/or rap song.
The context of CENTURIES of slavery in America, of continued discrimination against the African American community in the academic world, of continued ignorance in the non-African American communities of the world (including Africa) of the consequences and ramifications of slavery on the African American community today....the context is the "Rosette Stone of understanding" and a deeper understanding of that context will help pave the road to integrating our understanding of what we're trying to say to each other in intra-community conversations as well as inter-community conversations.
To add one thing, I thnk it's true of ALL under-educated/impoverished people of all racial/ethnic types that language tends towards a more "raw", direct tone. It's simply a result of lack of education in the school setting and a lack of time/energy to devote to autodidactic endeavors. In fact, when autodidactic measures are undertaken by people in positions of lower social standing, those endeavors are usually an effort to catch up to where more privileged people are in their normal school setting. So to get ahead, beyond the "privileged standard" of education, an underprivileged person has to work TWICE as hard. On top of working/looking for jobs to make basic ends meet (never mind summer vacations to Europe and such). So as a result, the underprivileged person might have potential and might have good ideas, but they don't have the refined language to articulate their ideas (of any type, not just scholarly) in a way that "satisfies" the academics' standards of acceptable language/articulation. It's society's burden, then, . to undertake the task of alleviating the less fortunates' financial burden so as to give an equal footing in language & application so as to create a world primed for progress. Poverty is a negative vector equal to the positive vector that holds us back from ever really achieving positive forward progress.
My issue is that this is disproportionately affecting communities of People of Colour (which, in America, includes African- Americans, First Nations peoples, the Latin community (meant to include Central &South American & Caribbean communities such as PR & DR), and those of mixed ethnicity). I feel that as such, the focus should be in those communities and implementation of new/revised educational policy and methodology and even technology should start in those communities, acknowledging that there will be inevitable growing pains. I think visualization technology is especially important and would have an especially positive impact in these communities because, in my experience, visualization tends to be more universal in it's use as a foundation for education. It's easier for someone without the language to describe an abstract idea to build a more robust, refined articulation when faced with a visual basis or metaphor for the abstract idea(s) in question. I honestly believe that's a very fundamental reason for my predilection for geometry as my mathematical "vantage point". It's easier for me to articulate the various abstractions of mathematics from the more visual context.
Section 3: The Language of Mathematics
I'm fairly certain that I'm the 1 trillionth person to say the following: mathematics is the language of science, and science is the language of nature.
Probably the one thing I've learned about mathematics that's really stuck with me is the idea that context is everything. Taking an integral of a function or a derivative of a function means all of nothing until you provide some context for those operations. Are you studying a physical science? Are you studying algebras? Are you studying geometry? Are you studying set theory? The specific sub-field (or intersection of sub-fields)is what gives these operations their meaning.
One of the reasons why I'm so drawn to what can be referred to as "pure mathematics" is the fact that it's sort of a "choose your own mathematical adventure" in terms of context. One of the things I really work towards in my own research is finding dualities between certain contexts. A question I ask myself often is "How many different fields of mathematics can I apply this methodology to?". There's so much freedom to explore, and there's always the opportunity for someone else to take your work into a whole new contextual frame that you yourself (or me myself) didn't see at first. I like the evolutionary aspect of it. Mathematics, as a language, is always growing in new directions, being applied to new fields. Some mathematicians use mathematical methods to...study mathematics.
One thing I love about the outdoors is the mathematical nature of...nature. Natures recursive aspects, its fractal aspects, its differential aspects. What's the path-wise probability of a single drop of water cascading down a multi-tiered waterfall? Questions like that inspire me. They may not inspire me to directly study those specific physical phenomena, but those questions can be asked in different contexts. The spirals on a shell have inspired everything from genetic research to fractal research. The context, and the myriad ways in which the original context can be bent & warped and played with is mind-boggling.
In fact, the reading of so many papers and books in so many fields where similar ideas are presented in completely different contexts is one of the reasons why I advocate so strongly (in practice, if nothing else) the use of Tables of Notations for notations I use in my work. It cuts down on the confusion when the reader isn't forced to try and figure out what you're using phi for, or if you mean pi as a number, or as a variable or as a function/operator... it can be down right impossible sometimes to keep up with what an author is trying to use a certain symbol for. Symbols change from subject to subject. Symbols change from author to author. Symbols change from paper to paper, even when the same author wrote both papers! I think if every researcher (and teacher) took the time to write out tables with notations & the meaning of each specific notation, mathematics (and science in general) would see a vast increase in valid, coherent work. Sometimes it seems like some authors prefer to be purposefully impenetrable so as to KEEP others from understanding their work. I find that to be a shameful practice. Scientists' main goal is to come to conclusions that help advance knowledge and understanding of the world we live in and to create a better world based on those results. It's against science and all science stands for to muddle understanding by creating incomprehensible symbology. Choosing incomprehensible, inconsistent systems of symbols and notations is not the hallmark of a scientist, it's the hallmark of a hierophant. If you view science as a mystery religion that only a select few should be allowed to understand, you are not a scientist, and you have no business calling yourself a servant of the sciences. You're a practitioner of mystery religions, and as such you are a left over artifact of a socio-evolutionary era that the rest of the world is moving on from.
I honestly don't have a lot to say about the mathematical language here. Mostly, I just wanted to end this blog post on a positive note (for my sake & the readers' sake), and nothing makes me feel more positive than talking (even briefly) about something I love.
As an additional comment, I'd like to say even in its most..."non-hierophantic approach", mathematics is very complicated. It's very easy to get caught up in simple indexing and sub-indexing mental knots. Symbolic notation and its inherent complexity is just part of the territory, and no amount of explicit notational explanation can change that. My main argument for notational...transparency is that it allows non-mathematicians to at least find the types of mathematical object they're looking for. For better understanding, and computation/application/theoretical nuance the non-mathematician will still inevitably need the assistance of the practicing mathematician. That's why people specialize in certain fields: so they can help other specialists in making more sense of our world and increasing our agreeable interactions with the world.