{"id":33214,"date":"2020-07-08T02:15:18","date_gmt":"2020-07-08T07:15:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/mathgradblog\/?p=33214"},"modified":"2020-07-08T02:15:18","modified_gmt":"2020-07-08T07:15:18","slug":"the-history-is-the-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/mathgradblog\/2020\/07\/08\/the-history-is-the-history\/","title":{"rendered":"The history is the history"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Pre-script:<\/strong> This is absolutely not the moment for centering white perspectives in public discourse. That being said, everything I understand about the fight for equality and justice leads me to the conclusion that the responsibility to dismantle whiteness falls uniquely to white people. This post goes with this aim in mind, in solidarity with the uprising to end systemic anti-black racism.<\/p>\n

1. Eponymy<\/h4>\n

Academia does not enjoy the fame of a position on the vanguard of social change. It is at once deflating and encouraging: the horror that must be witnessed, the massive public outcry it takes to incite our institutions to issue statements and undertake reflection that might to lead to action. On the other hand, the fact of these statements and the promise of action signal that our institutions, or the people that steer them, have tuned in, and it gives the opportunity to channel momentum to enact meaningful changes.<\/p>\n

I have a proposal for a modest change. It may seem like something that doesn\u2019t directly help the stakes of marginalized people in our community, but (1) it provides something everyone can do (2) it requires little effort and (3) I think it does have a direct impact on all of us. Further, there is a special role for the current generation of young mathematicians to play here, as we will soon become the primary bearers of mathematical culture. I\u2019m talking about the monuments we have in mathematical language which appear to celebrate bigots and racists.<\/p>\n

When a society names something for a person, whether it be a land, a town, a building, or an idea, the society is communicating its values. That person made some contribution which the society appreciates, and in return the society honors the individual with the transmortal fame of eponymy. By continuing to use the person\u2019s name as the name of something more permanent, the culture celebrates that person and their legacy.<\/p>\n

Over time, cultural values change, and a society may come to find that the once-sacred values a person stood for are no longer acceptable, let alone worthy of honor. Recently, this has become manifest in the efforts to remove Confederate monuments and symbols from public places and the names of Confederate generals and politicians from military bases, municipalities, and universities. The calculus here seems fairly simple. Slavery is abhorrent. We do not want to celebrate (or appear to celebrate) the history of slavery in this country. The psychic injury caused by the prominence of such monuments, not to mention the hypocrisy of their continued presence, outweighs any historic value they might tender. So they must come down. It is farcical to claim that the dislocation of inanimate sculpture amounts to an attack on heritage \u2013 heritage of the aggressor<\/em> culture.<\/p>\n

Academicians in general, and mathematicians in particular, have an obsession with eponymy. We also have what seems like a nervous compulsion to insist that as professionals, we are apolitical, and kindly stop bothering us trying to slip politics in with our morning theorem-precursor. This tenet of mathematical orthodoxy, always reminds me of Stephen Colbert, in character as Stephen Colbert, prefacing any discussion of race by making sure his interlocutor knows that he is “colorblind.” Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. Mathematics was for many centuries the domain of the priest and the patrician \u2013 sophisticated leisure for the leisure class. Since then we have variously been court scientists to emperors, patronees of dukes and kings, and in more recent memory, mercenaries of Wall Street, surveillance capitalism, the modern warfare machine, and the retooling of this machine<\/a> for local police forces to use on citizens with extreme prejudice. Proposition:<\/em> Mathematicians are not political. Corollary:<\/em> The pope is not catholic.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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If we can dispense with that small issue and accept that everything we do is bound up in the power relations of our society, the political import of our habits and conventions can begin to come into relief. To avoid further pontification, let me just lay out some facts, and you see if you can spot the same issue I do.<\/p>\n

2. Some American mathematicians<\/h4>\n

Benjamin Peirce<\/strong> (1809-1880)<\/p>\n

Known as in:<\/p>\n