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Beyond the Numbers: A Benjamin Banneker Association Conference Series

2012; Georgia State University; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.21423/jume-v5i1a168

2151-2612

Jacqueline Leonard, Erica R. Dávila, David W. Stinson,

Education Methods and Practices

hen asked to think of a mathematician, who comes to mind?René Déscartes (1596-1650, French)?Isaac Newton (1642-1727, English)?Or is it Carl Gauss (1777-1885, German)?When thinking about a mathematician, Westerners rarely think of anyone other than a White man of European origin-and even more rare, a woman of any cultural heritage.In fact, most Westerners are unfamiliar of Benjamin Banneker's name, much less his legacy as a mathematician.Societal discourses in too many ways continue to position mathematics as a discipline primarily reserved for elite White men.Children and youth, and people of all ages, internalize these discourses and, in turn, continue to imagine the mathematician as a White, middle-aged, balding or wild-haired man (Picker & Berry, 2000).The Einstein-ish silhouette readily comes to mind.Even when popular media attempts to diversify images of the mathematician and make mathematics "cool," the image of the White, wild-haired man is more times than not reified: recall the CBS network crime series NUMB3RS.In short, the "White male math myth" (Stinson, 2010, p. 3) and its apparent permanence continues to frame people's perceptions of mathematics participation and achievement and, in turn, assists in constituting the mathematics (education) enterprise all together as a "White institutional space" (Martin, 2010, p. 65).The negative consequences of this whiteness of mathematics continue to be played out inside apartheid (re)segregated and "integrated" schools and class-W