Posted on 01/18/2024 5:46:53 AM PST by Red Badger
Identity politics has corrupted academic disciplines and produced bad, politically warped forms of knowledge, says Alka Sehgal Cuthbert in Spiked, and even the hard sciences are no longer immune. Here’s an excerpt.
Witness the introduction of ‘Afrochemistry’, a new module in Rice University’s undergraduate chemistry degree. Students who choose this module will “apply chemical tools and analysis to understand black life in the U.S.” and “implement African-American sensibilities [eh? How do you “implement” a “sensibility”?] to analyse chemistry”, according to Rice’s website. “No prior knowledge of chemistry or African-American studies is required for engagement in this course,” it assures prospective students.
How, precisely, does “black life” affect chemistry – an objective, scientific discipline? And what exactly are these “African-American sensibilities”? Do Rice academics believe they have stumbled upon the ‘essence’ of being a black American, as if black Americans are a homogenous cultural bloc? And even so, what does all this have to do with chemistry? This is all hokum, bunkum, superstitious and retrograde. Such mythical thinking might have a place in artistic practice, but not in the study of the hard sciences.
Terms like “black life” and “African-American sensibilities” may have some delimited use within certain disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology and politics. But they are not generalisable concepts of knowledge. Furthermore, these buzzwords gesture to a racialised belief system, political discourse and social practice – the sort of things you’d find in DEI policies. They have nothing to do with the pursuit of scientific truth.
“We are at risk of undermining the very foundations of academia,” Alka says.
Worth reading in full:
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/01/15/afrochemistry-identity-politics-is-killing-academia/
In 1974 University of Missouri Kansas City enrolled me in a class called Algebra for Women. I unenrolled myself the first day and got into a regular Algebra class. I wanted nothing to do with a class for the helpless.
science was lost when the ability to determine that a Y chromosome and a X chromosome can create more than two genders. wondering now if maybe it’s the fault of the new mathamatics?
Reminds me of the nazification of arts, sciences, math, literature in the 1930s.
Hitler claimed to be a Christian but later went whole Pagan. What he came up with sounds so “Modern” today. Just the symbols of religion might be different, like a half man-half goat, with wings.
What the Hitler government envisioned for Germany was clearly set out in a
thirty-point program for the ”National Reich Church” drawn up during the war
by Rosenberg, an outspoken pagan, who among his other offices held that of
”the Fuehrer’s Delegate for the Entire Intellectual and Philosophical Education
and Instruction for the National Socialist Party.” A few of its thirty articles
convey the essentials:
1. The National Reich Church of Germany categorically claims the
exclusive right and the exclusive power to control all churches
within the borders of the Reich: it declares these to be national
churches of the German Reich.
5. The National Church is determined to exterminate irrevoca-
bly . . . the strange and foreign Christian faiths imported into
Germany in the ill-omened year 800.
7. The National Church has no scribes, pastors, chaplains or
priests, but National Reich orators are to speak in them.
13. The National church demands immediate cessation of the pub-
lishing and dissemination of the Bible in Germany . . .
14. The National Church declares that to it, and therefore to the
German nation, it has been decided that the Fuehrer’s Mein
Kampf is the greatest of all documents. It . . . not only contains
the greatest but it embodies the purest and truest ethics for the
present and future life of our nation.
18. The National Church will clear away from its altars all cruci-
fixes, Bibles and pictures of saints.
19. On the altars there must be nothing but Mein Kampf (to the
German nation and therefore to God the most sacred book)
and to the left of the altar a sword.
30. On the day of its foundation, the Christian Cross must be re-
moved from all churches, cathedrals and chapels . . . and it
must be superseded by the only unconquerable symbol, the
swastika.20
Afro-chemistry ???? Is that related to Afro-engineering??
LOL, I’ve heard that “term” for over 30 years. Chemistry just now catching on????
Ever since Sodom & Gomorrah, they have been seeking a way to rationalize and justify their perversion. Science is just the newest method for them to continue to do so.
They keep looking for that elusive ‘gay gene’ and suppose they actually find it, then what? Genes can be repaired now. If they actually found it, a ‘cure’ would be forthcoming, even if it took a few years.
The will never find it, but even if they did, they wouldn’t
tell anybody.
Why?
Because if they did, it would prove them to be defective and in need of repair, and therefore unnatural. Then they would have no excuse for not getting ‘healed’, other than they ‘Like being that way’, which would amount to admitting that it’s a ‘choice’, which the now deny vehemently......................
“Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.”
― George Orwell, 1984
I agree with you in principle, but I think the era of “making money” is deader than most seem to want to realize.
1) Just flip on a Television, and you will see that the ads are not for real products. They are ambulance-chasers, pill-manufacturers, debt-consolidators or insurance companies. These are all schemes for stealing money, not making it.
2) The money you “make” is US Dollars. The Gubmint gets to decide how much, if anything, they are worth.
3) We are heading for The Revolution. These people are angling sides and survival, not dollars.
4) No one has even been defunded, yet. It’ll be eye-opening to get to witness a revolution where one side feeds the other, but it looks like we are going to get to see it.
"No mo' money for you!" - illegal tells black woman in Chicago
The professional science organizations (ACS, APS, AAAS, Sigma Xi) went woketard years ago.
Publicly held Corporations still need to make a profit, so they will hire only qualified individuals to fill their ranks of research and development staff.
They will hire some quota people to keep Uncle Sugar happy, but the bottom line must be BLACK and not RED..............
We have lost another great university. Rice U is now on my DO NOT HIRE list.
Rice once turned out good engineers.
I appreciate what you are saying, but could you, perhaps, give one or two names? I can only think of large corporations which, today, are unbelievably “woke”. I don’t dispute that what you say may exist, but I expect that it is not in the majority.
The company I formerly worked for appeared happily to lose money for the agenda of outsourcing. China and India have benefited greatly from what has been given to them, and DEI is probably the company’s main focus, at this point. This is a tech company and manufacturer.
I just see, time and again, on FR what I think is a very “old school” view of what runs the world. For instance, China probably runs more companies in America than any pursuit of a “dollar”. Company boards are happy to “survive”, and making anything is a distant second.
INSIDE AMERICAN EDUCATION by Thomas Sowell. A must read.
Brooke Johnson, the ‘preceptor’ (whatever that is) in the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) department at Rice.”
“Preceptor” = Lucrative sinecure for connected black “scholar” with otherwise useless PhD in Afro-American studies. Said scholar must then produce some kind of “work” to justify his six figure salary. Hence, “African Chemistry”.
What a complete load of asinine tripe. And how is this going to prepare the students in this joke class for further science courses, unless they are also “Afro” crap? Or to actually do meaningful science? Shame on Rice University; it’s gone down the same gutter as as lot of schools we’ve been reading about.
BTTT
“It is nothing more than Academic Onanism for the woke virtue signalers to high five each other...”
You summed it up perfectly. That should be in the black chemistry course description.
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