How to Undo Woke Programming

the roots go deep, but you can salt the earth

To get my college degree (a bachelor’s in mathematics, with specialization in statistics) I had to take three courses that were approved for diversity credit. This was a general education requirement for all bachelor’s degrees.

Some majors have some courses that get this credit as a side effect. A friend who double majored in gender studies, for example, got her diversity credits without trying just by fulfilling her major requirements. And most of the humanities majors have at least one course that works for a “D credit.” English majors can get a D credit if they take “Black Women Writers,” and History majors can get one for “Marching Under the Rainbow: Queer Activism.”

Mathematics majors, alas, had to take all three in other departments. I took Diversity Issues 1, 2, and 3 to knock mine out. The main thrust of these courses was to learn all about victimhood and victimizers. The intersectional approach, with focus on race above everything else, was how they taught us to look at literally everything. Some of my assignments included writing and sharing multiple journal entries about deeply personal topics—I mostly wrote fiction because my life history was none of the class’s fucking business—and attending a protest. (I asked for, and got, an alternative assignment because I didn’t want to go to an event that might result in damage to my hearing aids).

Classes in Victimhood, that Hurt Victims

The classes actively did damage, in my opinion. Directly, in some cases. A male friend who was sexually abused throughout his childhood decompensated badly and started drinking a lot more after the session wherein the boys had to sit silently and listen to the girls describe everything we regularly do and think about to avoid sexual assault. I lost touch with him after I offered to go with him to an AA meeting. He declined.

To be fair, I think the disability and religion units were useful, largely because they were practical. I taught the class some basic ASL and explained how to help someone with hearing difficulties. A blind student gave us an inside look into how seeing-eye dogs are trained and how they differ from pets. Students and community members who practice minority religions discussed their traditions and holidays. Those sessions provided useful knowledge.

The primary effect of the classes for me was this: they deeply ingrained the reductive, simplistic mindset of intersectional analysis. They taught me to knee-jerk to analyzing everything that happens in my life that I don’t like as a consequence of “oppression” — the facts of my sex and disability, or structural inequities because of living in America, the most oppressive of all the oppressors.

I had the astonishing good fortune of being in therapy (with a real therapist, someone who challenges me and holds me accountable, not someone who makes me feel better) all through college, so much of the damage was mitigated. But damage was still done. I still catch myself falling into the victim mindset they taught me was the model of reality. Twitter is, ironically, a great antidote this. The victim mindset rules there and is shown in all its ugly, living color—and reminds me constantly of who I don’t want to be.

But it’s still there, and I still have to be vigilant. The culture and media constantly reinforce it, and my active attempts to reject it sets me at odds with my peers and many of my friends.

Here is a story of one time when I successfully fought back.

Yesterday, I got an instacart delivery of groceries. Instacart is how I have done my grocery shopping for awhile now—ever since I got my grown-up job. I use it partly because I have a bum shoulder and it’s worth a delivery fee and tip to me to spare my shoulder the workout, but mostly to save time. I’m trying to pay my student loans off as quickly as possible, so I have a full-time job—a good one, a remote position doing math for a large multi-national corporation—and two side hustles.

The shopper had to message me six times while he was shopping, because my area is having the same supply chain issues and shortages that much of the rest of the country is experiencing. His last message gave an ETA, at which I headed downstairs (my apartment is a segmented upstairs portion of a large Victorian mansion, accessed from the back porch) to meet him.

I was wearing Halloween socks, hightop Chuck Taylors, black spandex thermal underwear, black gym shorts, and this t-shirt:

For those of you who aren’t math people, the t-shirt is a pun. It has the symbol of pi, a mathematical constant that is pronounced like the dessert, “pie,” and thus the shirt says “pumpkin pi.”

My shopper was cute, 25 or so, and drove a car much nicer (and newer) than mine. He held brown grocery sacks in each arm. When he saw me emerge from the door with the large apartment number on it, he stopped short. He looked my body up and down, his gaze pausing on my chest, and said: “Do you know about the number pi?”

I wasn’t sure I understood him correctly — was he asking about my shirt, or was he introducing some kind of math joke? If I said “no,” would he respond with “Well you can’t try any number pie, because seven ate it!” Or was he actually asking about pi? Or had I not heard him correctly—something that happens to me, a deaf person who relies on hearing aids, almost every day?

I said, “I’m sorry?”

He pointed at my chest and informed me, in the verbal tone of a teacher enlightening a class:

“That symbol on the pumpkin is called pi and it’s a very big thing in geometry.”

Then I had one of those moments where dozens of possibilities exist and I was somehow aware of all of them.

The Monster Inside Me

My university training reared up inside me, along with the word “mansplain” and a desire to cut him down to size. A vicious, ego-driven monster inside me wanted to inform him that he does my grocery shopping because I’m too busy earning a small fortune by doing math, including complex mathematical modeling, and so yes, as a matter of fact, I do know quite a lot about pi. Would he like to see my full-color collector’s edition of Euclid’s Elements? Did he even know who Euclid was?

I am grateful for a mindfulness practice and years of therapy to work on the emotional control that I never learned during a trauma-blighted childhood, where my only hope of getting my needs met was to emote too loudly to be ignored. These blessings enabled me to take a deep breath, let it out slowly, smile, and say:

“Yeah. I’m kind of a math nerd, so I know about pi. As soon as Halloween is over, I’ll swap this one for the one that says ‘Fa’ and then ‘La’ to the 8th power.”

When he left, I was putting my groceries away and thinking about what happened.

I am entirely capable of flipping a bitch switch and cutting another person to verbal ribbons, and I was sorely tempted to do so. I am very grateful that I didn’t do it.

We Get To Choose Our Reactions

That’s not who I want to be. When I am annoyed by someone making a false assumption about me, I don’t want to be a person who jumps to the least charitable interpretation. Maybe he thought I didn’t understand my shirt because he holds sexist views about women and mathematics. But maybe that wasn’t it at all. Maybe he works as an instacart shopper because he has crippling social anxiety and it lets him be alone most of the time. Maybe he’s a socially awkward Asperger’s nerd who was thrilled to see a t-shirt with something he knew about, and making a bonehead comment was literally the best he could do. Maybe he had any of dozens of other serious problems, and my eviscerating him with the evidence of my knowledge of mathematics (in a situation where, as the subordinate/employee, he couldn’t defend himself effectively, if at all) would’ve been an act of brutality or even actual harm — actual harm, as opposed to the “violence” that my D1, 2, and 3 professors would’ve asserted he committed against me by his moronic comment.

And Sometimes Our Feelings Follow

I thought about how my next therapy session would’ve gone if I had acted on my initial, emotional impulse, and shivered in gratitude. My therapist is not at all parental, so it’s not that I would’ve disappointed him. It’s that he would’ve been relentless in making me face exactly what I did, and why, and that would have been an extremely unpleasant fifty minutes of my life.

Realizing that made me examine why the impulse to react like a victim was still there. Cultural, media, and university programming to immediately and aggressively find and respond to any and all examples of “victimhood” are all powerful, no doubt.

But the impulse only exists because something in me, some part of me I haven’t rooted out yet, still agrees with it on some level. I spent a few minutes on my meditation bench reflecting, and came up with this: it took months at my new job before I was completely sure that I hadn’t been a diversity hire. It took months, and being given responsibility for a project that affected an enormous amount of money and a lot of other people’s jobs.

The constant drumbeat of how women, especially STEM women, are oppressed and how everything is against us and every STEM industry is a hellpit where the men constantly work to keep us down — it got to me. It made me doubt myself. It made me feel that I was heading into enemy territory where I was unwelcome and would be constantly under fire. It put me on the defensive from the start.

That means that I was given an extra burden of doubt.

What It Really Means

I was handed a gold-plated excuse to fail, a permission slip to mediocrity that wouldn’t be my fault.

The part of me that still believes their bullshit is the part of me that wants to cling to those things as a safety net.

I am angry that our culture is now set up to give people, especially the people who can least afford it — racial minorites, women in STEM, the disabled, etc. — those things as a matter of course.

They are “gifts” that I intend to return to sender.

Preferably in pieces.