2 plus 2 equals 4. But not in the left wing universe where logic and reason have no place. In Florida, Ron DeSantis restored math to math textbooks and again things add up. Deroy Murdock tells us how he did it.

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Murdock: Dr. Jessica Watkins rode a Space-X rocket out of Cape Canaveral at 3:52 a.m. Wednesday. Destination: the International Space Station, where the 33-year-old astronaut became the ISS’s first Black female crew member and flight engineer. From 248 miles above sea level, this UCLA Ph.D. (geology), Cal Tech post-doctoral fellow, and fifth Black woman in space can peer down in astonishment at those on Earth who consider math racist and not quite right for Blacks.

Florida, the state from which Watkins launched, recently decided not to use 54 mathematics-instruction volumes in its classrooms. “Reasons for rejecting textbooks included references to critical race theory,” the Sunshine State’s Department of Education announced on April 15.

The state’s Gov. Ron DeSantis recently said: “It seems that some publishers attempted to slap a coat of paint on an old house built on the foundation of Common Core, and indoctrinating concepts like race essentialism, especially, bizarrely, for elementary school students.” Indeed, 71 percent of texts submitted for grades K-5 violated the state’s laws against woke-tainted teaching materials.

DeSantis’ move is just the latest effort to undo the damage created by the increasingly radical education establishment, which sees a white hood lurking behind every blackboard.

Among the many odious untruths peddled by these critical race theorists is the notion that 2 + 2 = racism: Mathematics classes and math itself, they lie, are tools of bigotry and instruments of white oppression against Blacks and other minorities.

●Math education is “unjust and grounded in a legacy of institutional discrimination,” according to a joint statement by the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics and TODOS: Mathematics for All. “A social justice stance interrogates and challenges the roles power, privilege, and oppression play in the current unjust system of mathematics education.”

●Rochelle Gutierrez, a University of Illinois Professor of Mathematics Education, claims that “On many levels, mathematics itself operates as Whiteness. Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as White.”

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●Brittany Marshall, a self-described “teacher, scholar, social justice change agent” at Rutgers University in 2020 cannot count to five without finding racism. As she put it: “The idea of 2 + 2 equaling 4 is cultural and because of western imperialism/colonization, we think of it as the only way of knowing.”

●The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture released a graphic titled “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness & White Culture in the United States.” These include “Objective, rational linear thinking” and “Quantitative emphasis.”

●In 2021, the Oregon Department of Education promoted “ethnomathematics.” This concept holds that “white supremacy culture” is a menace that “infiltrates math classrooms,” particularly when “the focus is on getting the ‘right’ answer” and when students are “required to ‘show their work.’” According to this program’s Equitable Math text, “The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so.”

●Regarding physics, classroom whiteboards “can be racist,” according to W. Tali Hairston, director of community organizing at Seattle Presbytery. Referring to his research paper “Observing Whiteness in Introductory Physics: A Case Study,” Hairston told Campus Reform: “Our findings support other studies that have found the study of physics to include racism and sexism.”

After examining the behavior of three students, a laughingly small statistical sample, Hairston and his co-author, Seattle Pacific University Physics Professor Amy Robertson, concluded that white boards “collaborate with white organizational culture, where ideas and experiences gain value (become more central) when written down.”  The authors did not explain whether writing physics formulae on blackboards also fuels the “reproduction of whiteness.”

This sanctimonious bigotry of low expectations screams, “racism!” at everyone while staying politely mum about its underlying prejudice: Blacks either cannot do math or, if they can, they are tinkering with Whitey’s tools of ethnic subjugation. Historical and current events bury this toxic sewage beneath countless examples of Black Americans who have thrived by mastering mathematics.