Skip to main content
Disciplines
Automotive Business IT + Informatics Construction + Real Estate Electrical Engineering + Electronics Energy + Sustainability Insurance + Risk Finance + Banking Management + Leadership Marketing + Sales Mechanical Engineering + Materials
DE
EN
Books
Journals
Events
Topic Page
Marketing
Log in
Learn more about individual access
Request company access
12th International Engine Congress 2025 | 25. + 26. February 2025

Meeting Place for the Powertrain and Sustainable Fuels Community

The congress will examine the future role of the internal combustion engine and its non-fossil fuels from a global perspective with leading experts. Be part of it! More information and booking options are available on our website.
EXTENDED SEARCH
Log in
Top
TechTrends
Published in:

15-12-2022

Anti-racism for Freethinkers: Cultivating a Mindset for Curiosity and Scientific Inquiry in the Context of Racial Equity and Social Justice

Authors: Ron Eglash, Audrey Bennett

Published in: TechTrends | Issue 3/2023

Login to get access

Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.

search-config
loading …

Abstract

The term “freethinking” originated in the 17th century to describe inquiry into beliefs which were accepted unquestioningly. Feminists such as Mary Wolstonecraft, abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, and novelists such as Mark Twain and Zora Neal Hurston are among the many who dared to simultaneously challenge religious dogma, patriarchal convention and racialized boundaries. But today the concept has been appropriated by the alt-right. A broad spectrum ranging from hardened white supremacists to those with more centrist tendencies have developed a discourse that objects to any form of antiracism on the grounds that it runs counter to individualism and freethought. In this essay we suggest that this critique from the alt-right should not be dismissed. Rather, it should be the impetus to revitalize the connections between antiracism and the principles of freethinking. We map out some of the history in which these connections were previously established; the reason the connection was weakened, and the principles by which the confluence could be restored. We recount some initial experiments using educational technologies to support this framework.
previous article Race-Positive Career and Technical Education: Techno-Social Agency Beyond the Vocational-Liberal Divide
next article Racial Justice Amidst the Dangers of Computing Creep: A Dialogue
Footnotes
1
For example the “right to refusal” when science education creates a destructive context is highlighted in Martin et al. 2019. An older example would be Aimé Césaire in his 1939 poetic manifesto of the Négritude movement: “Hurray for those who have never invented anything. For those who have never explored anything. For those who have never vanquished anything.” (Césaire 2017).
 
2
Bauernfeind and Babbitt (2020). Metabolic changes in human brain evolution. Evol Anthropol. 29(4):201–211. doi: https://​doi.​org/​10.​1002/​evan.​21831.
 
3
Of course evolution is not “deliberate”; that is shorthand for describing an adaptive advantage that is so deeply integrated that it exists across wide phylogenetic spans.
 
4
Recent research suggests that since vitamin B (folate) is degraded by UV light, its dietary availability could have interacted with latitude to play a role in the evolution of skin color (Lucock et al., 2022).
 
Literature
Babbitt, W., Lachney, M., Bulley, E., & Eglash, R. (2015). Adinkra mathematics: a study of ethnocomputing in Ghana. Multidisciplinary Journal of Educational Research, 5(2), 110–135.
Bagemihl, B. (1999). Biological exuberance: animal homosexuality and natural diversity. Macmillan.
Battle-Baptiste, W., & Rusert, B. (Eds.). (2018). WEB Du Bois’s data portraits: visualizing black America. Chronicle Books.
Bedini, S. (1999). The life of Benjamin Banneker: the first African-American Man of Science. Maryland Historical Society.
Benjamin, R. (2022). Viral justice: how we grow the World we want. Princeton University Press.
Bennett, A., Eglash, R., Lachney, M., & Babbitt, W. (2016). Design agency: diversifying computer science at the intersections of creativity and culture. In Revolutionizing Education through web-based instruction (pp. 35–56). 
Césaire, A. (2017). Journal of a Homecoming/Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Translated by N. Gregson Davis. Duke University Press.
Deri, S., Dinnerstein, D., Harding, J., & Pepitone, A. D. (1948). Techniques for the diagnosis and measurement of intergroup attitudes and behavior. Psychological Bulletin, 45(3), 248.CrossRef
Desmond, A. J. (1997). Huxley: from devil’s disciple to evolution’s high priest. Diane Publishing.
Desmond, A. J., & Moore, J. R. (2009). Darwin’s sacred cause: How a hatred of slavery shaped Darwin’s views on human evolution. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Deyle, S. (2005). Carry me back: the domestic slave trade in american life. Oxford University Press on Demand.
Donovan, B. M., Semmens, R., Keck, P., Brimhall, E., Busch, K. C., Weindling, M., & Salazar, B. (2019). Toward a more humane genetics education: learning about the social and quantitative complexities of human genetic variation research could reduce racial bias in adolescent and adult populations. Science Education, 103(3), 529–560.CrossRef
Du Bois, W. B. (1903). The souls of black folk. Bantam Classic, New York.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1968). The autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois; a soliloquy on viewing my life from the last decade of its first century. International Publishers.
Eglash, R. (1997). The African Heritage of Benjamin Banneker. Social Studies of Science, 27(2), 307–315.CrossRef
Eglash, R. (2013) Towards a Cybernetics of Race: determinism and plasticity in ideological and biological systems. In J. Hartigan (Ed.), Anthropology of Race: Genes, Biology, and Culture (pp. 57–82). SAR Press 
Eglash, R. (2019). Anti- racist technoscience: a generative tradition. In R. Benjamin (Ed.), Captivating Technology: race, Carceral Technoscience, and liberatory imagination in Everyday Life. Duke University Press.
Eglash, R., Bennett, A., Lachney, M., & Babbitt, W. (2020, April). Race-positive design: A generative approach to decolonizing computing. In CHI 2020 Extended Abstracts. Honolulu, HI, USA
Eglash, R., Bennett, A., O'donnell, C., Jennings, S., & Cintorino, M. (2006). Culturally situated design tools: ethnocomputing from field site to classroom. American anthropologist, 108(2), 347–362.
Folse, H. J. (1985). The philosophy of Niels Bohr: the framework of complementarity. Elsevier.
Giere, R. N. (1990). Evolutionary models of science. Evolution, cognition, and realism (21–32).
Gould, S. J. (1981). The Mismeasure of Man. W.W. Norton.
Hlusko, L. J., Carlson, J. P., Chaplin, G., Elias, S. A., Hoffecker, J. F., Huffman, M., & Scott, G. R. (2018). Environmental selection during the last ice age on the mother-to-infant transmission of vitamin D and fatty acids through breast milk. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(19), E4426-E4432.
Huff, C. D., Xing, J., Rogers, A. R., Witherspoon, D., & Jorde, L. B. (2010). Mobile elements reveal small population size in the ancient ancestors of Homosapiens. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(5), 2147–2152.
Huxley, J., Haddon, A. C., & Carr-Saunders, A. M. (1936). We Europeans: a survey of'racial'problems. London, Harper.
Jerome, F., & Taylor, R. (2005). Einstein on race and racism. Rutgers University Press.
Kaplan, E., & Kaplan, S. (1998). The Black Presence in the era of the American Revolution. University of Massachusetts Press.
Lachney, M., Babbitt, W., Bennett, A., & Eglash, R. (2020). ‘A Voice to talk about it’: Cosmetologists as STEM experts in Educational Technology design and implementation. European Journal of Open Distance and E-Learning, 22(2), 41–55.CrossRef
Lachney, M., Eglash, R., Bennett, A., Babbitt, W., Foy, L., Drazin, M., & Rich, K. M. (2021a). pH empowered: community participation in culturally responsive computing education. Learning Media and Technology, 46(3), 333–354.CrossRef
Lachney, M., Babbitt, W., Bennett, A., & Eglash, R. (2021b). Generative computing: african-american cosmetology as a link between computing education and community wealth. Interactive Learning Environments, 29(7), 1115–1135.CrossRef
Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society. Harvard University Press.
Lucock, M. D., Jones, P. R., Veysey, M., Thota, R., Garg, M., Furst, J., & Beckett, E. L. (2022). Biophysical evidence to support and extend the vitamin D-folate hypothesis as a paradigm for the evolution of human skin pigmentation. American Journal of Human Biology, 34(4), e23667.
Martin, D. B., Price, P. G., & Moore, R. (2019). Refusing systemic violence against black children: toward a black liberatory mathematics education. In Critical race theory in mathematics education (pp. 32–55). Routledge.
McWhorter, J. (2021). Woke racism: how a new religion has betrayed Black America. Penguin.
Montagu, A. (1943). Man's most dangerous myth; the fallacy of race. New York, Columbia University Press.
Mullen, L. (2014). These maps reveal how slavery expanded across the United States. Smithsonian.
Murphy, B. J. (2021). Multiplied without Number: lynching, statistics, and visualization. in Ida B. Wells, Mark Twain, and WEB Du Bois. American Literature 93(2), 195–226.
Russell, B. (1944). The value of free thought: how to become a truth-seeker and break the chains of mental slavery. Haldeman-Julius Publications.
Scott, P. D., Williams, R. J., & Ho, K. M. (1997). Forming categories in exploratory data analysis and data mining. In International Symposium on Intelligent Data Analysis (pp. 235–246). Springer.
Soyfer, V. (1994). Lysenko and the tragedy of Soviet Science. Rutgers University Press.
Stringer, C. (2011). The origin of our species. Allen Lane.
Templeton, A. R. (2013). Biological races in humans. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 44(3), 262–271.
Terry, J. (1999). An American obsession: Science, medicine, and homosexuality in modern society. University of Chicago Press.CrossRef
Wells-Barnett, I. B. (2021). The red record: tabulated statistics & alleged causes of lynching in the United States. Read Books Ltd. (Original work published 1895).
Zimmerman, H. T., Weible, J. L., Wright, E. A., Vanderhoof, C., & Jablonski, N. G. (2022). Using youths’ personal DNA data in science camps: fostering genetics learning and socio-emotional attitudes toward science with design‐based research. Science Education.
Metadata
Title
Anti-racism for Freethinkers: Cultivating a Mindset for Curiosity and Scientific Inquiry in the Context of Racial Equity and Social Justice
Authors
Ron Eglash
Audrey Bennett
Publication date
15-12-2022
Publisher
Springer US
Published in
TechTrends / Issue 3/2023
Print ISSN: 8756-3894
Electronic ISSN: 1559-7075
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-022-00815-9

Other articles of this Issue 3/2023

Discovering Unproductive Learning Patterns of Wheel-spinning Students in Intelligent Tutors Using Cluster Analysis

  • Original Paper

Digital Technology for a Borderless World: Innovative Educators in Practice

  • Guest Editorial

A Chat about GPT3 (and Other Forms of Alien Intelligence) with Chris Dede

  • Column: Rethinking Creativity and Technology in Education

Race-Positive Career and Technical Education: Techno-Social Agency Beyond the Vocational-Liberal Divide

  • Original Paper

Trends and Topics in Educational Technology, 2023 Edition

  • Column: Guest Editors’ Notes

Interrogating Algorithmic Bias: From Speculative Fiction to Liberatory Design

  • Original Paper

Premium Partner

    Image Credits