The Unbearable Whiteness of Being

The American Physical Society views the existence of White Privilege in physics as being both scientific and not scientific.

A little over a year ago, I tweeted about what seemed to be a ludicrous article that had just been published in the prestigious physics journal Physics Education Review (a Physical Review journal) titled “Observing whiteness in introductory physics: A case study” (Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 18, 010119 (2022)).  The article claimed, among other things, that the use of whiteboards was an example of “whiteness” in physics. It seemed so silly that when I wrote about it again a month later in a Substack post, I stated that when I had first read it, I thought it was a spoof paper written by Peter Boghossian or one of his colleagues, to see whether this kind of content could now make it through the refereeing process today, even in hard science publications.

But what eventuated more recently is like something out of Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22, as I describe in this article that appeared this week in Quillette. It may be hard to believe it is true, but it is…