Black Thoughts Matter: Decolonized Math, Academic Censorship, and the "Pythagorean" Proposition

In: Journal of black studies, Band 48, Heft 3, S. 256-278

Abstract

In postapartheid South Africa, Whites dominate academics and Black students are agitating for decolonization. Decolonization requires contesting the false history of science used to set up colonial education essential to colonization—the same false history that was used to morally justify racism, by asserting the noncreativity of Blacks. The "evidence" for this false history is often faith-based, so White-controlled academics disallows any open discussion. Furthermore, this false history is sustained by another trick: a little known interplay between history and philosophy. Thus, geometry has been credited to Greeks on the ground that they had a "superior" philosophy of mathematics as deductive proof. In fact, the "Pythagorean" proposition had no valid deductive proof before the 20th century. Furthermore, this claim of philosophical "superiority" was never academically debated, and is not allowed to be. A recent attempt to explain the falsehood of this claim, along with the counterevidence against purported Greek achievements in math, was publicly censored. In fact, in Egypt, Iraq, and India, there was a different and immensely superior understanding of the "Pythagorean" proposition, which superior way was not grasped in the West, resulting in its persistent navigational problems until the late 18th century.