Quantcast

National Science Foundation Spent $500K to Examine White ‘Privilege’ in Physics

(Pamela Cosel, Headline USA) As cultural norms sink deeper and deeper into a cesspool of wokeness, and all the divisive labeling and segregating it entails, two researchers from Seattle Pacific University have embarked on deconstructing “whiteness” in physics.

The pair of avowed critical whiteness scholars used nearly a half-million dollars of taxpayer money “to develop a knowledge base that could lead to awareness of how power relations may be embedded in the way physics is taught and learned,” according to The College Fix.

Their ultra-woke research project was funded with a $495,847 grant from the National Science Foundation, to gain a keen perspective on “Understanding Centrality and Marginalization in Undergraduate Physics Teaching and Learning to Enhance Student Persistence and Success,” the word-salad title of their final paper.

The grant was awarded in 2018 with expectations that research would be completed by May 2023, as part of National Science Foundation’s mission “to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense.”

To that end, the duo of Seattle Pacific University researchers studied and analyzed physic classes and interviewed test participants, then used their critical whiteness theory “to show how privilege operates in undergraduate physics teaching and learning,” reported The College Fix.

The research team expected to find reasons why “Physics has among the lowest representation of women and people of color of all the sciences compared to the total population in the country as well as the population enrolled in higher education.”

Predictably, the terms critical race theory, racism and white supremacy are all components of the Introduction section of the research paper.

In one study, the researchers deconstructed the whiteness of physics by examining the demographics of students in introductory physics classes at six universities to see which groups were over- or underrepresented. 

“Our aim is to make progress in characterizing the demographics of introductory physics courses, which is imperative to deepening our understanding of how social disparity is manifested in physics classrooms and the institutions that host them,” the totally unbiased researchers who haven’t already settled on their conclusions wrote.

The duo hunted for discrimination and marginalization by looking for “certain characteristics that U.S. culture typically associates with white masculine behavior, including control, independence, and decisiveness.”

In another study, critical whiteness theory was put through the paces when the two researchers reviewed nearly two weeks of the dynamics and demographics from introductory physics classes at three universities.

One of the participants in the study professed to being comfortable with the researchers’ methods because it helped her “get the right answer, the thing that has been ascribed value by whiteness.”

The hours and hours of footage contained mundane classroom interactions, with no racial drama or offensive behavior. But that didn’t fit the narrative the two researchers plotted, so they tailored their perspective through the trusty lens of white privilege.

A male participant is “centered,” while the two female participants’ “sense making and contributions are marginalized,” the scholars opined.

The learning ecosystem was rife with examples of what the researchers’ flow chart tagged as “invisible” labor, white supremacist patriarchy, slavery, femicide and ecocide, among other evils spawned by Colonialism and Capitalism.

“This social organization is co-constructed and co-maintained by at least five mechanisms of control: the EID [energy interaction diagram] representation, physics values, the use of whiteboards, gendered social norms, and the structure of schooling.”

Absent any legitimate conclusions, it seems the nearly $500,000 taxpayer gift of a grant mostly paid the salaries and tuition for some leftist wokesters from 2018 to publication of their efforts in 2022, finishing a year earlier than expected.

Headline USA’s Mark Pellin contributed to this report

TRENDING NOW