Is Math Racist?

The War on Numbers and How It’s Impacting An Entire Generation of Students, Teachers and Reason. --- By Gary Null, PhD

Photo by Taso Katsionis on Unsplash

The Accusation

We first began to hear it in the colleges. Then in the high schools. Then, astonishingly, from the mouths of educators themselves. Math, they said, is racist. Say it slowly. Let it land. Math — the discipline that measures the distance between stars, that calibrates the dose of a life-saving drug, that tells the engineer exactly how thick a steel cable must be before ten thousand commuters ride a suspension bridge over it — is racist.

Now, I want to be generous here. I want to give this argument every possible benefit of the doubt. So let me ask the question directly: Who does math discriminate against? Not a number. Numbers do not know your name, your neighborhood, your skin tone, or your ancestry. The quadratic formula has never asked anyone for their papers. Pi has been irrational and universal for over four thousand years — the same in ancient Babylon, in Alexandria, in Beijing, in Timbuktu, in every civilization that ever chose to look at a circle and ask why.

And yet here we are. A person can now walk into an American school or university, announce that math is racist, and trigger not a debate but a war — a war against anyone who dares to disagree. The professor who says, gently, patiently, “Please, look at what math actually does — I see no evidence that it is racist” will be targeted, investigated, and in many cases destroyed professionally. Not because he was wrong. Because he was right, and that was unforgivable.

The universities — including their own math departments — side with the outraged student. Not out of conviction. Out of fear. Because in our current climate, a student’s emotional outburst carries more institutional weight than a century of mathematical proof. The word “racist” has become a trump card that ends every conversation it enters. No evidence required. No argument needed. Just the accusation, and the room goes silent.

The Metastasis

Once people saw how easy it was — how one charged word could dissolve any academic requirement, cancel any course, erase any standard — the contagion spread. Schools across the country began making math optional. Then minimal. Then, in some cases, absent. At the same moment, per-student spending continued to climb. More money, less learning. More administrators, fewer skills. More sensitivity training, less arithmetic. In some of the most heavily funded school districts in the country, not a single student tested proficient in math. Not one.

But they were fluent in something else. They knew their pronouns. They knew the approved number of genders. They knew that white males were toxic from birth, that merit was a weapon of oppression, and that if someone made them feel uncomfortable by teaching them long division, that discomfort was a form of violence. This is not education. This is a factory for producing functionally illiterate adults who have been trained to confuse their emotional reactions with facts.

Dr. Jonathan Haidt, one of the finest and most courageous psychologists in America today, has spoken openly about what this climate has done to the university. He no longer invites certain guest speakers. He avoids comedy, avoids certain films — no matter how historically important — because someone, somewhere in the room, may claim a microaggression, and then that person’s distress becomes the entire story. The curriculum, the truth, the educational purpose — all of it becomes secondary to the management of feelings.

And the teachers who were dragged before Title IX tribunals for the crime of teaching? In the vast majority of cases, their colleagues did not come to their defense. Not because their colleagues agreed with the charges. Because they were afraid. Because they had watched what happened to the ones who spoke up, and they chose survival over solidarity. We call that cowardice. We used to call it by other names in other times.

What Math Actually Is

So let us do what no one in the woke coalition seems willing to do. Let us look at what math actually is — not as an abstraction, but as the living infrastructure of human civilization. Let us walk through the real world and ask, honestly and without ideology, what would remain if we stripped away mathematics.

The answer is: almost nothing.

The Built World

Every structure you see — every home, every apartment building, every office tower, every bridge, every dam, every tunnel — exists because mathematics made it possible. When an architect designs a single-family home, he is calculating load-bearing requirements, beam deflection, snow load on the roof, the angle and pitch of the rafters, the tensile strength of the foundation bolts. A mistake in any one of those calculations does not mean an inconvenience. It means the house falls down on the family inside it.

Now scale that up. A skyscraper in Manhattan or Chicago or Shanghai is an exercise in applied mathematics so complex that it would have seemed like sorcery to a medieval craftsman. Structural engineers calculate the lateral forces exerted by wind at the 80th floor. They model harmonic resonance — the way a tall building sways — and design damping systems to prevent the sway from amplifying into catastrophe. They compute the compressive strength of concrete columns, the yield stress of steel, the thermal expansion of the curtain wall glass across a range of fifty degrees Fahrenheit. Every bolt, every weld, every connection point in that building is governed by an equation. The building stands not because someone believed in it. It stands because someone calculated it.

The same is true for the dwelling you sleep in tonight. The electrical wiring in your walls obeys Ohm’s Law. The gas line to your furnace is sized according to pressure-flow equations. The insulation in your ceiling is rated by an R-value — a mathematical expression of thermal resistance. Your home is mathematics made livable.

Transportation: Moving the Human Body Through Space

Consider the subway train. In New York City, more than three million people descend underground every day and trust their bodies to a system governed entirely by physics and mathematics. The trains run on tracks whose gauge — the distance between rails — is precisely 4 feet, 8.5 inches, a measurement standardized centuries ago and maintained to tolerances of fractions of an inch, because a deviation of even a quarter inch at high speed can mean derailment. The signaling systems that keep trains from colliding are Boolean logic made physical — millions of mathematical decisions per second, governing speed, distance, braking, timing. The electricity that powers those trains is distributed through a third rail at 625 volts DC, a specification derived from careful calculations about power loss over distance, the resistance of the rail itself, and the energy demands of the motors. None of this is a feeling. All of it is numbers.

The automobile you drive is a thousand simultaneous mathematical problems in motion. The internal combustion engine operates on the thermodynamic cycle that Sadi Carnot described in 1824 — heat converted to work with an efficiency governed by the ratio of temperatures. The fuel injection system calculates in real time the precise mixture of air and fuel needed for complete combustion at any given throttle position and engine speed. The suspension geometry — the angles of the control arms, the camber of the wheels, the rate of the springs — is designed to keep the tires in contact with the road under every combination of cornering, braking, and acceleration forces. The antilock braking system pulses the brakes at a mathematically optimized frequency to prevent wheel lockup. And when you plug your destination into the navigation system, an algorithm calculates the shortest path through a graph of hundreds of thousands of intersections — a problem that, solved by hand, would take a lifetime.

Now look up. The commercial aircraft flying overhead at 35,000 feet is, more than almost anything else humanity has ever built, a triumph of applied mathematics. The Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet. That tiny leap into the air required them to understand lift, drag, thrust, and weight — the four forces of flight — in mathematical terms precise enough to build a working wing. Today, a Boeing 787 carries 300 people across an ocean at 85% of the speed of sound, guided by autopilot systems that make thousands of course corrections per minute using calculus-based control theory. The wings flex under load in ways that were calculated before a single piece of metal was cut. The pressurization system maintains cabin altitude at 6,000 feet while the outside air is so thin a person would lose consciousness in seconds. The fuel burn is optimized continuously against wind vectors, weight, and altitude to extend range. Every rivet in that aircraft was placed according to a stress analysis. If math is racist, then flight is racist — and we should all start walking.

And the ship on the ocean: naval architecture is the mathematics of buoyancy, stability, and structural integrity in one of the most unforgiving environments on earth. Archimedes understood displacement in the third century BC. Today, container ships longer than the Empire State Building are tall carry 20,000 shipping containers across the Pacific, their hulls shaped by computational fluid dynamics to minimize drag, their ballast systems continuously adjusted to maintain stability in heavy seas. The cargo you buy — the food, the electronics, the clothing — arrives because a naval architect once sat down with equations and proved, on paper, that a hull of a certain shape and displacement would float and steer and survive.

Medicine: Mathematics Between Life and Death

If there is any domain where the stakes of innumeracy become literally mortal, it is medicine. And yet this is precisely where the assault on mathematical thinking does its most devastating harm.

Consider the pacemaker — that small device implanted in the chests of millions of people whose hearts beat irregularly or too slowly. A pacemaker generates electrical pulses at precisely timed intervals, calculated in microseconds, to stimulate the heart muscle at the right moment in the cardiac cycle. The voltage of each pulse, the pulse width, the refractory period — all are specified to mathematical tolerances measured in millivolts and milliseconds. Too little voltage and the heart does not respond. Too much and you induce fibrillation. The pacemaker’s engineers solved differential equations describing cardiac electrophysiology to find the narrow window in which the device saves a life rather than ending it. That device is working right now in someone’s chest — someone’s grandmother, someone’s father — because engineers understood mathematics deeply enough to trust their calculations with a human life.

Or take the blood workup your doctor orders. A complete blood count reports hemoglobin in grams per deciliter, white cell count in thousands per microliter, platelet count in ranges calibrated against population norms derived from statistical studies of hundreds of thousands of patients. The reference range your lab prints next to your result — that narrow band of “normal” — was established by biostatisticians who analyzed distributions, calculated standard deviations, and determined what values predict disease and what values predict health. When your doctor says your creatinine is elevated and orders further tests, she is reading a number against a mathematically derived threshold and making a probabilistic judgment about your kidneys. When the radiologist reads your CT scan, the image itself was reconstructed from raw data using an algorithm — the Radon transform — that is pure mathematics.

Clinical trials — the mechanism by which we establish whether a drug or therapy actually works — are exercises in applied statistics from beginning to end. Randomization, blinding, sample size calculation, power analysis, confidence intervals, p-values, hazard ratios: every step of a properly designed clinical trial is a mathematical operation. The reason we do not still treat infections with bloodletting and purging is that someone eventually demanded numerical proof. The reason we know that certain cancer therapies extend survival by measurable months or years is that statisticians analyzed the data honestly. The reason we know that some widely prescribed drugs were causing harm — and pulled them from the market — is that the math eventually told the truth that the marketing obscured.

A nurse who cannot do dosage calculations is not a caring nurse — she is a dangerous one. The difference between 0.1 milligrams and 1 milligram of certain medications is the difference between treatment and overdose. Pediatric dosing is calculated by weight; get the arithmetic wrong and a child dies. IV drip rates are calculated from body weight, drug concentration, and desired dose per hour. These are not abstract exercises. They are the mathematics of keeping people alive.

Time Itself

You looked at your watch this morning. Maybe your phone. You knew it was seven-thirty, or nine, or noon. You planned your day accordingly. But have you ever stopped to ask what a clock actually is?

A mechanical watch is a machine that divides time into equal intervals using the oscillation of a precisely engineered balance wheel or tuning fork. The gear train — the series of interlocking gears connecting the mainspring to the hands — is a mechanical computation, multiplying the tick rate of the escapement by ratios calculated to produce exactly one revolution of the second hand every sixty seconds, one revolution of the minute hand every sixty minutes, one revolution of the hour hand every twelve hours. The tooth counts of those gears are not aesthetic choices. They are solutions to a set of ratio equations. The man who designed them was doing math.

The digital clock on your microwave counts oscillations of a quartz crystal vibrating at 32,768 times per second — a frequency chosen because it is exactly 2 to the 15th power, which allows simple binary dividers to produce a precise one-second pulse. The GPS satellite network, which tells your phone not just the time but your location to within a few feet, depends on relativistic corrections to the satellite clocks — corrections derived from Einstein’s equations of special and general relativity. Without those mathematical corrections, your GPS would drift by miles per day. The fact that you can navigate to an address you have never visited is a consequence of some of the most sophisticated mathematics ever developed by the human mind.

The Invisible Mathematics of Daily Life

The electricity in your home flows because James Clerk Maxwell wrote four equations in the 1860s that described the relationship between electric and magnetic fields — equations that predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves before anyone had detected one. Every power plant, every transmission line, every transformer, every motor running in every appliance in your home operates on principles derived from Maxwell’s equations. The smartphone in your pocket communicates by radio waves — electromagnetic waves — whose behavior is described entirely by that same mathematics.

The internet itself is applied mathematics. Data compression algorithms — the techniques that allow a high-definition movie to be streamed over a fiber cable — are based on information theory, a field founded by Claude Shannon in 1948 with a single paper that was, at its core, a mathematical argument about entropy and probability. Every time you send a message, encryption algorithms based on number theory — the properties of prime numbers — scramble your data so that only the intended recipient can read it. The security of your bank account depends on the mathematical difficulty of factoring the product of two large prime numbers. Without number theory, there is no financial privacy, no secure commerce, no safe communication.

Weather forecasting — the prediction that tells you to carry an umbrella or evacuate a coastline before a hurricane — is numerical weather prediction, a field that runs atmospheric physics equations forward in time on supercomputers. Climate models that project temperature changes decades into the future are systems of partial differential equations solved across three-dimensional grids of the atmosphere and ocean. You may agree or disagree with specific climate predictions, but the machinery by which those predictions are made is mathematics — the same mathematics that tells a pilot what the weather will be at the destination airport.

The food on your table arrived via a supply chain optimized by linear programming — a mathematical technique developed in the 1940s. The supermarket’s inventory system uses statistical forecasting to predict demand and minimize waste. The price of that food on the commodity markets was set through a process involving options pricing models derived from the Black-Scholes equation — stochastic calculus applied to financial contracts. Even hunger and its alleviation are, in the modern world, mediated by mathematics.

Mathematics Through the Centuries: The Foundation of Civilization

This is not new. Mathematics did not arrive with the digital age. It has been the engine of human civilization since the earliest settled societies looked around and realized that their survival depended on their ability to count, measure, and calculate.

The Babylonians, four thousand years ago, used a sexagesimal — base-60 — number system to track astronomical cycles, predict eclipses, and create the sixty-minute hour and the three-hundred-sixty-degree circle that we still use today. They solved quadratic equations on clay tablets. They calculated square roots and compound interest. Their mathematics enabled the irrigation systems that fed the cities of Mesopotamia — the first urban civilization in human history.

The Egyptians used geometry to resurvey the Nile floodplain every year after the annual inundation washed away the boundary markers. The word “geometry” itself means “earth measurement.” The Great Pyramid of Giza was built to tolerances of inches across a base of 756 feet — an engineering achievement that required sophisticated knowledge of arithmetic, geometry, and surveying. Without mathematics, there is no pyramid. Without mathematics, there is no Egypt.

The Greeks formalized mathematics as a deductive discipline — built it on axioms and logical proof — and in doing so created the template for all Western science. Euclid’s Elements, written around 300 BC, organized the geometry of planes and solid figures into a logical system that remained the standard mathematics textbook for two thousand years. Archimedes calculated the value of pi with more precision than most modern students can recall, and laid the foundations of integral calculus seventeen centuries before Newton and Leibniz formalized it. Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the Earth in the third century BC, using only the angle of shadows and knowledge of the distance between two cities, and got within one percent of the correct answer.

In the Islamic Golden Age, mathematicians in Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordoba preserved and extended Greek mathematics, developed algebra — the word itself comes from the Arabic al-jabr — and created the decimal number system we use today, including the concept of zero. Without zero, there is no calculus. Without calculus, there is no physics. Without physics, there is no engineering. Without engineering, there is no modern world. The number zero is not a trivial gift.

Newton and Leibniz, independently, invented calculus in the seventeenth century — a mathematics of change and accumulation that made it possible to describe the motion of planets, the flow of fluids, the behavior of heat, the dynamics of populations. Newton used his calculus to derive the law of universal gravitation — to prove, mathematically, that the same force that pulled an apple from a tree also held the Moon in its orbit. From that insight came orbital mechanics, and from orbital mechanics came the ability to launch satellites, and from satellites came the GPS in your pocket and the weather forecast on your phone.

The industrial revolution was, in large part, a revolution in applied mathematics. The steam engine was improved from a crude pump to a precision machine through the mathematical analysis of thermodynamics — the science of heat and work. James Watt did not improve the steam engine by feeling strongly about steam. He measured, calculated, and redesigned. The railroads that knit together continents in the nineteenth century were built by surveyors who used trigonometry to find level routes through mountains, and by structural engineers who used mechanics to design bridges that would not collapse under the weight of a locomotive.

The twentieth century was an explosion of applied mathematics without precedent. Einstein’s general relativity — a system of tensor equations describing the curvature of spacetime — predicted phenomena so strange that physicists argued about them for decades: the bending of light around massive objects, the slowing of time in strong gravitational fields, the existence of black holes. Every one of those predictions has since been confirmed by observation. The nuclear age began when physicists solved the equations describing the binding energy of atomic nuclei and realized that small amounts of mass could be converted into enormous amounts of energy. The space age began when engineers solved the orbital mechanics equations and demonstrated, mathematically, before a rocket was ever built, exactly how much thrust would be needed to escape Earth’s gravity.

The digital revolution — the revolution that produced the computer in your lap, the phone in your hand, the internet connecting billions of people — rests entirely on mathematics. Boolean algebra, developed by George Boole in the 1850s as a pure mathematical abstraction with no apparent practical application, turned out to be the foundation of digital logic. Every transistor in every microchip is implementing a Boolean operation. The billions of transistors in a modern processor are implementing billions of Boolean operations per second. Claude Shannon’s information theory established the mathematical limits on how efficiently information can be transmitted and stored. Alan Turing’s mathematical theory of computation defined what a computer can and cannot, in principle, do. Without these mathematical foundations, there are no computers. Without computers, there is no modern medicine, no modern finance, no modern communication, no modern logistics. The question is not whether math matters. The question is whether anything matters that does not involve math.

The Children We Are Failing

Now bring it back to the classroom. Bring it back to the child sitting in a school where math has been made optional, where standards have been gutted in the name of equity, where the goal is no longer to produce a student who can calculate but to produce a student who feels affirmed.

What are we telling that child? We are telling her that she is not capable of learning mathematics. We are dressing that message in the language of liberation, but the message is the same: you cannot do this, so we will not ask you to try. We will give you a diploma that says you are educated. We will tell you that the standards were racist and that your struggle with them was evidence of their racism, not evidence that you needed more help, better teaching, and higher expectations. We will send you out into the world functionally innumerate — unable to calculate a drug dose, unable to read a statistical claim, unable to understand the financial contract you are about to sign — and we will call that justice.

It is not justice. It is abandonment dressed in progressive language. The communities that suffer most from mathematical illiteracy are not the wealthy enclaves where private schools teach calculus to ten-year-olds. They are the communities that were told math was not for them. They are the children who were given slogans instead of skills, who were told their feelings were more important than their knowledge, who emerged from twelve years of schooling with a diploma and no ability to navigate the quantitative demands of modern life.

The data on American mathematical performance is unambiguous and should be a source of national shame. In the 2022 Program for International Student Assessment, the United States ranked below the average of developed nations in mathematics — below Estonia, below the Czech Republic, below Vietnam. The nations that consistently top those rankings — Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Finland — do not treat mathematics as optional, do not tell their students that rigor is oppression, do not dismantle standards in the name of making everyone feel good. They hold their students to high expectations and provide the support needed to meet them. And their students, across every demographic, perform at levels that American students — including American students from every background — could match if we demanded it and supported it.

The nations rising to economic and technological leadership in the twenty-first century are building their futures on mathematics education. China graduates four times as many STEM students per year as the United States. India’s elite engineering institutions are globally competitive. While we are debating whether asking a student to solve an equation constitutes a microaggression, other nations are producing the engineers, the physicians, the data scientists, the financial analysts, the physicists who will shape the coming century. We are handing them the future with a bow on it.

And the tragedy — the real, deep tragedy — is that the students who are hurt most by this are the ones the movement claims to be helping. The child who was told math was racist and graduated without it cannot become the engineer who designs the infrastructure for her community. She cannot become the physician who treats the patients in her neighborhood. She cannot become the scientist who develops the therapies that her community needs. She cannot become the economist who analyzes the policies that affect her people. Every door that mathematics opens — and it opens nearly all of them — remains closed to her. Not because of her race. Because of what we failed to teach her.

The Hypocrisy Test

I want to make a simple proposal. It is not original. It is not subtle. But it is the only honest response to the argument that math is racist.

If math is racist, then every product of mathematics is racist. And so I ask everyone who has staked their identity and their politics on that claim to apply it consistently. Do not ride the subway. It was built with mathematics. Do not drive a car. It was designed with mathematics. Do not board an airplane — the physics of lift are mathematical, and apparently that makes them racist. Do not have a pacemaker implanted if your heart needs one, because the device that keeps you alive was engineered using the very mathematics you have declared an instrument of oppression.

Do not take any medication whose dose was determined by a pharmacokinetic equation. Do not allow your blood to be tested in a laboratory that uses statistical reference ranges. Do not benefit from a clinical trial whose results were analyzed with regression models and confidence intervals. If you are injured, do not go to a hospital whose imaging equipment uses Fourier transforms to reconstruct your MRI — that is mathematics, and by your own reasoning, it is racist.

Do not use a smartphone. Do not use the internet. Do not use GPS. Do not watch television broadcast from a satellite. Do not use electricity — Maxwell’s equations again. Do not live in a building designed by a structural engineer, eat food distributed by a logistics algorithm, or keep money in a bank whose security depends on number theory.

Live consistently with your argument. And then come back and tell me about the racism of mathematics.

Of course no one will do this. Because everyone who makes the argument lives, every day, inside a world that mathematics built. They are protected by it, healed by it, fed by it, connected by it, moved by it. Their hypocrisy is not incidental to the argument — it is the argument. The claim that math is racist is not a sincere position about mathematics. It is a power play. It is a mechanism for dismantling standards without having to justify that dismantling on the merits. And the people who pay for that power play are the students who were entitled to an education and did not receive one.

What We Must Do

The answer is not complicated, even if it is not easy.

We must restore mathematical standards to every school in America, at every level, without exception. Not as punishment. As respect. As the acknowledgment that every child — every child — is capable of mathematical reasoning, and that to tell them otherwise is to lie to them about their potential and steal from them their future.

We must recruit and compensate mathematics teachers as the national resource they are. A teacher who can make algebra comprehensible to a struggling thirteen-year-old is performing an act of enormous social value. We treat them as an afterthought and pay them accordingly.

We must stop conflating standards with discrimination. A standard is not a barrier erected to exclude. A standard is a destination — a definition of where we want students to arrive. The answer to students not meeting a standard is not to eliminate the standard. It is to increase the support, improve the instruction, and hold the expectation that every student can and will get there if we do our jobs.

We must tell our children the truth about mathematics. Not that it is easy. Not that it will never be frustrating. It is demanding, and there will be moments of failure. But failure in mathematics is not evidence of incapacity — it is the mechanism by which understanding is built. Every mathematician who has ever lived has been stuck, confused, and wrong before being right. The struggle is not a sign that you do not belong. It is proof that you are learning.

We must tell our children what mathematics makes possible. Not in the abstract. Concretely. Show them the subway signal system and explain the Boolean logic. Show them the pacemaker and explain the voltage calculations. Show them the weather satellite image and explain the orbital mechanics. Show them the statistical argument in the clinical trial that proved a treatment worked. Connect the mathematics on the blackboard to the world they live in, and let them see that the world was built by people who once sat in classrooms exactly like theirs and worked problems exactly like the ones they are wrestling with now.

None of what we are losing to mathematical illiteracy is abstract. The bridges we will not be able to build. The diseases we will not be able to cure. The clean energy systems we will not be able to design. The financial safeguards we will not be able to analyze. The civic arguments we will not be able to evaluate because we cannot read the data. These are real losses. They accumulate slowly, then suddenly, and by the time they are visible, they are very hard to reverse.

A Final Word

Mathematics does not know your race. It does not know your gender, your politics, your income, your zip code, or your ancestry. It does not reward ideology or punish identity. It rewards thinking — clear, patient, rigorous, honest thinking. It is, in that sense, one of the most democratic enterprises in the history of the human species. Any person, from any background, in any era, who is willing to think carefully enough and long enough, can do mathematics. Can understand mathematics. Can use mathematics to build something the world has never seen.

The greatest mathematicians in history have come from every corner of the world. Srinivasa Ramanujan, one of the most intuitive mathematical geniuses who ever lived, grew up poor in South India and taught himself from a single borrowed textbook. Sophie Germain, in an era when women were formally excluded from scientific institutions, made foundational contributions to number theory and elasticity theory under a male pseudonym because it was the only way anyone would read her work. David Blackwell, the first Black scholar inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, made seminal contributions to game theory and statistics. Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson — the Black women mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped put Americans in space — did not need mathematics to be stripped of its standards to prove their brilliance. They needed mathematics to be exactly what it was: a system of truth that cannot be argued with, cannot be intimidated, cannot be made to lie.

That is what we are throwing away. That is what we are telling our children they do not need and cannot handle. And the people telling them that are not their liberators. They are the newest iteration of an old story: the powerful deciding, for their own reasons, that certain people are better off not knowing too much.

Mathematics is not racist. Keeping children ignorant of it is.