The Color of Science
WINKLER, CLAUDIA
Ideas The Color of Science By Claudia Winkler An evolutionary biologist and a black man, Joseph Graves took pleasure in the coincidence: His symposium "Pseudo-science, Biology, and the Education...
...Science and race are Graves's preoccupations, when he isn't teaching at Arizona State University West or pursuing his research into aging in five species of fruit fly...
...that 500 years ago the Dogon people of Mali, using no instruments, discovered the star known as Sirius B, imperceptible to the naked (Western) eye...
...On the side, as a member of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos in Science, he developed an interest in providing "culturally relevant" teaching materials for Mexican American children...
...Ideas The Color of Science By Claudia Winkler An evolutionary biologist and a black man, Joseph Graves took pleasure in the coincidence: His symposium "Pseudo-science, Biology, and the Education of African American Students" was held on February 12, the birthday of both Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln...
...A stint as a teacher in Detroit's public schools in the late 1980s drove the point home...
...But though it was willing enough a few years back to condemn the teaching of creationism as science, the association's board has been silent on melanism and the Baseline Essays...
...and that, in conclusion, "African people" are "the wellspring of creativity and knowledge on which the foundation of all science, technology and engineering rests...
...All people are scientists," it teaches, with the implication that one person's science is as good as any other's...
...The co-editor of the volume and co-chairman of the symposium was Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, from Wayne State University in Detroit...
...to observe with care...
...The trouble is, the essays are polluted with a wild disregard for truth...
...As Ortiz de Montellano worked on teaching materials for Mexican American students, he kept expecting someone to do the same for blacks...
...Indeed, much of the Egyptians' "science" is hard to distinguish from religion-which makes it a fascinating study for mature historians and philosophers of science, Ortiz de Montellano points out, but a confusing part of the grade-school science curriculum...
...But Graves was dismayed by the scientific illiteracy of his students and by what he called "the prevalence of non-scientific ideas among the teachers across the board, not just African Americans...
...Finally someone did-disastrously...
...Inadequate supplies and rundown facilities were no surprise...
...In 1995, Graves secured a $20,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to produce a collection of essays with the same title as his symposium, which took place at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Baltimore...
...to propose a hypothesis and test it...
...One wonders, though, why more voices are not raised...
...in organic chemistry from the University of Texas, then moved into anthropology, writing a book on medicine and diet among the Aztecs...
...And he both critiqued what he regards as the spurious genetics in Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve and denounced pseudoscientific arguments offered on radio call-in shows to prove The Bell Curve a slander against African Americans...
...Adams's essay is filled with interesting information about the Egyptians' remarkable achievements-their calendars and dams, their architectural feats, their skill at embalming...
...Lauderdale, and D.C...
...The Baseline Essays proved highly influential and have been adopted, formally or informally, Ortiz de Montellano says, by hundreds of school systems across the country, including those in Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago, Ft...
...merely that in teaching, it is essential to spark a child's curiosity and that including in the curriculum examples drawn from the child's distinctive heritage can help to do this...
...The eye-popping mendacity of the Baseline Essay on science (revised in 1990) begins with the misidentification of its author...
...One fears the gentle scholars may be squeamish-for surely they do not believe that mental ghettos are good enough for minority children...
...The essay goes on to deconstruct the concept of science, emphasizing that all knowledge is culturally determined and objectivity is unachievable...
...The fashionable solution-an Afrocentric science curriculum-he concluded would make the problem worse...
...Ortiz de Montellano has tried for years to persuade the American Association for the Advancement of Science to speak out against pseudoscience for African Americans...
...He pleads for a simple educational ethic of self-respect earned by hard work, honest assessment, and genuine achievement...
...By all means, he says, use culturally relevant teaching materials whenever possible...
...He debunked "melanism," the bogus theory that black people, allegedly including ancient Egyptians, have superior mental, physical, and paranormal powers because they have more melanin in their skin and their brains than whites...
...Scientists, he says, are taught to observe, and if they have eyes to see, they cannot fail to notice that the condition of African Americans is deteriorating...
...Given the anti-academic environment in which many minority students find themselves, teachers must powerfully fire children's interest to persuade them to persevere through the four years of high-school math and science they will need to study science in college...
...Hunter Havelin Adams, III is called a "research scientist of Argonne National Laboratories, Chicago...
...But let children be taught to distinguish science from the supernatural...
...Graves went back to graduate school...
...Let them learn to ask for evidence...
...His idea, he explained at the symposium, is not that there is one science for whites, another for minorities...
...Born in Mexico, Ortiz de Montellano began his career with a Ph.D...
...For in the name of building black children's self-esteem, this curriculum mangled the very definition of science and brought into the classroom "incorrect methods for addressing the natural world...
...Such inflated claims can only harm children by offering them "an illusory moment of self-esteem," Ortiz de Montellano asserts...
...African science-basically, that of the ancient Egyptians-is based on a "science paradigm" that is "antithetical to contemporary Western ones," which are guided by "non-ethical considerations such as cost effectiveness...
...The symposium presented a sampling of the work to appear in the book, which is due out later this year...
...But along the way it tosses off without evidence such whoppers as the claim that the Egyptians invented the glider and "used their early planes for travel, expeditions, and recreation...
...In 1987 the Portland, Oregon, public schools published the pioneering "Baseline Essays in Afrocentric Education," intended as guidance to grade-school teachers...
...By stirring the indignation of men like Graves and Ortiz de Montellano, the excesses of the Afrocentric education movement may have sown its destruction...
...He started his work on flies at the University of California at Irvine, but he also publicly took on "scientific racism" in several of its guises...
...Unlike the science of dead white European males, Egyptian science makes room for both "material and transmaterial cause and effect" and investigates "psychoenergetics," including "precognition, psychokinesis, and remote viewing," better known as ESP "Africans understood the multidimensionality of the mind: logical/rational, intuitive/symbolic, and emotional/spiritual," the Baseline Essay says...
...in fact, he was a technician (he is now, reportedly, a medical student...
Vol. 1 • March 1996 • No. 24
