I’ve coined a new term—“white math.” This is when numeric inequalities between people of color & whites are ignored or proclaimed nonexistent or even reversed. The term comes out of a response to my critique of Miss Saigon in Opine Season (and here below on my blog) by one Bob Dunning, who writes: “It’s funny to me that the same people who had a hard time with Jon Pryce in Saigon have no problem with Lea Salonga as a French hooker in Les Mis.” My reply: There’s a typical white person, Bob Dunning, who believes that if white people take thousands of things that ought to belong to people of color–as in the entire history of the representation of Asians in American cinema and stage–then a person of color taking one thing evens it all up. I call this “white math.” There are myriad examples of white math: The setting free of one possibly guilty black man, O.J. Simpson, is a greater outrage than all the race based arrests and false convictions of blacks and Latinos and all the systemic racial imbalances in the justice system. The average white child gets $700 more paid for their education than the average black or Latino child. The white math equation: White student + $700 = Black/Latino + 0. Passing a voter ID law because there were possibly four false votes in Wisconsin is reasonable, even if it ends up disenfranchising a much greater percentage of people of color than white people. Because those four false votes are more important and count more than the thousands of people of color who will not be able to vote because of the law. Halliburton and its shareholders make billions off a war started on false premises by a former Halliburton executive, and that possibly can’t be welfare or a waste of the taxpayer’s dollars. But Reagan’s single black mother with two kids receiving food stamps of sixty bucks a week? That’s an outrage; that’s government waste. Here, under white math, sixty bucks is “greater than” (remember that old math sign?) several billion. Whites steal a continent from your people and commit genocide on you, but you Native Americans really need to put that in the past. It’s nothing now. Zero. On the other hand, if you Native Americans want us to change the name of our sports team, that’s infringing upon our rights to free speech. That’s the real crime. A very positive number. Some Native Americans don’t mind the name of the Washington team. So in white math, that lesser number overrides the majority of Native Americans who do mind. Our university can take into account an almost always white applicant being the scion of alumni or of a major donor, that is, someone who’s already had advantages that others don’t have. To admit that person because of those advantages isn’t actually giving the applicant an unfair advantage. But if we take into account how the race of a black or Latino or Native American student may actually have led to their having less advantages, that’s clearly giving the POC student an unfair advantage. Hard to even express the math logic in that one. I think it goes: White Positive Advantage=Zero (or perhaps a negative number). POC lack of advantage=Does not compute (imaginary number?). White people and black people use marijuana at the same rate. And yet, if a white person uses marijuana he is less likely than a black person to be arrested for the same crime; if arrested, the white person will be less likely to go to trial then the black person; at trial, the white person will be less likely to be convicted; if convicted the average sentence of a white person will be less than the average sentence for blacks. So in white math, take one hundred white users and one hundred black users of marijuana. If five of these white users are arrested and ten of the black users are arrested, under white math those percentages must be equal. Okay, people: #WhiteMath--post your own examples. For a longer version of this post, see An Asian American on White Math: blog.davidmura/
Posted on: Mon, 19 May 2014 20:01:57 +0000
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