Rice University's new "Afrochemistry" class reportedly intends to explain alleged "inequities in chemistry and chemical education" – inequities that Donna Jackson of the Project 21 Black Leadership Network says do not exist.
As an African American woman who worked hard her entire life, who sacrificed time with her family to be able to achieve a certain status level, she is insulted by this type of class.
"When you tell a whole group of people that math is racist, that doing homework is racist, that taking tests is racist, that being on time and apparently following the clock is racist, then what you've done is actually destroyed their ability to believe in themselves," Jackson submits.
When she was studying to be an accountant, she says race was never discussed in her numerous math and business classes, because race has "nothing to do with it." Part of being successful, she says, comes from analytical thinking.
"They reject all of that for this notion that someone else is responsible for your success, that we just need to get rid of, in their mind, white people, and then we can succeed," she continues. "How is that going to happen? Math is still going to be math. Science is sill going to be science."
What they are training all Americans to think is that black Americans are not capable of training themselves to think critically, "and that's the biggest bigotry of them all."
But according to a Wall Street Journal op-ed, such classes "are beginning to appear almost everywhere and are getting support and encouragement from the scientific establishment."
"When I was applying for deputy controller and vice president [at Export-Import Bank of the United States], I had to compete against hundreds of applicants that were qualified. I was the one that they picked because of my merits, and they're taking all of that away from me," Jackson laments. "They're taking away all of my life achievements because they're saying that everyone that looks like me only has that position because they check a box. I wish we would get rid of those boxes."
"I'm just so tired," she confesses. "I'm just exhausted, and I'm frustrated about it. This class is nothing more than a farce. They're passing off a class in activism and pretending that it's actually science. It's not."
