A Need, a Voice, and Our Fight Against [White] Approval
By Pamela E. Harris, Associate Professor of Mathematics, Williams College, @DPEHarris and Aris Winger, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Gwinnett College, @ArisWinger
“I’d also like to ask the reader to make sure that when we share stories, that they hear them and listen for understanding rather than responding. Listen to these stories. Feel the feeling that we’re sharing through these stories and resist the thoughts of “Well, I haven’t seen that” or, “Well, that hasn’t happened in my experience” or, “Well, you’re just one person of color,” …
“Yet, simultaneously, the reader must know that there are unifying elements that we can do to make the atmosphere better for a large number of students. And so I think that’s something that’s quite central to this book — these stories, these experiences that we’re sharing are going to be personal and that they don’t represent an entire community, but we expect the reader to stay present in the story, to really take in the stories and then be willing to reflect. So when you do get uncomfortable reading what we’re saying, what do you immediately do? Do you get defensive? Why do you get defensive? Ask yourself these questions.”
-Asked and Answered: Dialogues On Advocating For Students of Color in Mathematics
During the fall 2020 semester, we co-created and co-facilitated a webinar series supported by the American Mathematical Society and the American Institute of Mathematics titled “Advocating for Students of Color: There Is More You Can Do.” This four-part series brought together over five hundred unique participants from over two hundred institutions worldwide. Through the creation of the webinar’s content, we recognized a deep need in the mathematical community: a guidebook for how one starts the process of becoming an advocate for students of color in the mathematical sciences. This need allowed us an opportunity to amplify our own voices through answering the questions we received — often repeatedly — about such work. This led us to a new endeavor: authoring the book Asked And Answered: Dialogues On Advocating For Students of Color in Mathematics.
However, the writing of this book almost didn’t happen. Internal doubts started to dominate and bubbled to the surface.
Can we do this?
Who are we to do this?
Whose approval do we need to publish our own thoughts?
Impostor syndrome weighs heavily in the first two questions. We have had those feelings before and have experience with pushing beyond them. The third question had a much greater effect on us. It took many forms:
Who is going to publish this book?
Who will validate this work?
The scope of this question was larger and of a deeper nature, almost hidden to us. What we were experiencing for the first time was a fight against the prevalent academic indoctrination of a publication process that seeks a particular type of approval. This approval is what we (the authors) now refer to as “white approval.” The reader might wonder what this means and why we use the word “white” in our definition. Let us expand on this.
What our white colleagues may take for granted is that a majority of their colleagues and supervisors tend to look like them. This has some unseen benefits and privileges that we, as people of color, do not share. We implicitly and explicitly live our lives and careers looking for approval, personally and professionally, from our professors, advisers, senior colleagues, and administrators, the majority of whom are white. Imagine your progress and upward mobility being tied to impressing those who do not look like you. Can you imagine feeling compelled to convince those who have little interest in supporting policies that uplift you [1] to approve your work?
So how can we write a book about and to the mathematical community, which is predominantly white, without getting a professional organization, which is mostly white, and an editorial board, which is mostly white, to give the nod of approval and validate our work?
Instead of focusing on how we would get our book published, we leaned on our belief that small changes (what we call “5% actionable changes”) would create a ripple of positive change throughout the community and that this ripple effect would reach more people in written form. Moreover, the webinars and the outpouring of support helped validate that people want to hear what we have to say about advocating for students of color within the discipline. This built a sense of urgency that helped us begin the writing of the book.
Yet, doubts seeped into our work. The timeline we set felt unrealistic. In reflecting on this, we both admit that we procrastinated and secretly hoped that the other might back out of the project. Without a book there would be no need to face any potential professional repercussions of not having gone through a traditional book publishing process.
The cover of Pamela E. Harris and Aris Winger’s recent book Asked And Answered: Dialogues On Advocating For Students of Color in Mathematics.
Hypocrisy stared us in the face, as the first few pages of the book ask the reader to embrace discomfort, to push past it, because the work one needs to do to be a better advocate for students of color requires it. The work that one must do to fight white supremacy within mathematical spaces is personal and often it is painful. But as much as we claimed to “be woke,” our internal socialization made us question ourselves and our own voices. It made us question even our own worth. Fortunately, the mission and purpose behind what we were writing was so central to who we are working to become that it served, fueled, and propelled us to complete the book even as we fought internally against the discomfort of seeking white approval for our work. Moreover, we knew that whatever happened, including any potential professional backlash we might face, we would be able to handle it together.
Leaning on each other in our own individual moments of self-doubt, we completed the book and decided to embrace self-publishing as our personal fight against the need for white approval in higher education.
However, the battle is not over.
We are two PhD mathematicians of color who have self-published a book, and you, the reader, have now learned that we did not receive white approval nor did we ask for it. Although it is currently trending as the top release in STEM Education and Inclusive Education, no organization gave a stamp of approval, no anonymous referees gave their review and approved of the content.
How does this affect your decision to read and support self-published work?
Can you fight the battle against the deeply-rooted default that academic work must be edited and anonymously reviewed, even though that is very likely receiving feedback mostly from white people? In particular, who would you deem adequate to edit our lived experiences as two mathematicians of color?
How uncomfortable do you feel even thinking through your answers to these questions? What will you do about/with this discomfort?
We urge the mathematical community to do some deep self-reflection on the questions above. Our hope is that the community continues to support, elevate, and amplify the work of people of color within our discipline, and we hope our book is included in that work.
We can now conclude with our answer to the question:
Whose approval do we need to publish our own thoughts?
Our contributions stand objectively on their own without the scrutiny of others who implicitly and sometimes explicitly believe that the true measure and value of our contributions is tied to white approval. Our message is rooted in deep and critical love with the aim of making the mathematical community a better place for people of color. That needs no one's approval.
[1] Topaz, C. M., Cart, J., Eaton, C. D., Shrout, A. H., Higdon, J. A., Ince, K., … Smith, C. M. (2019, December 22). Comparing demographics of signatories to public letters on diversity in the mathematical sciences. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/fa4zb