Diversity statements

[posic]

https://yigal-s.livejournal.com/1161647.html

My diversity statement -- http://posic.livejournal.com/1022545.html

Comments

[posic.livejournal.com]

I am not here to teach you anything. I've proclaimed my diversity statement. The conversation with you that followed is to serve as a commentary to that. The power of it does not lie in it being particularly convincing to a person of your current persuasion. It lies in the real-world consequences of the fact of its publication, here in open access under my real name.

I am a research mathematician, a pure academic by calling. My research is being published as books, papers, and preprints, under the same real name which I have. I need some income in order to survive, just as everyone else. Now, there are basically two possible outcomes.

Either I get a job, or a sequence of jobs, in the Western academia, which will allow me to survive and continue both my mathematical research and my publication of political statements (like the above one) in my blogs. Which will mean that the Western academia will have to swallow its leftist pride and open some space for an explicitly politically incorrect person such as me on its campuses.

Or otherwise, skipping some or another more or less obvious development of subsequent events, I will not survive. Then, several decades from now, my name will be mentioned in political conversations as a way to illustrate certain historical phenomena, in a way not quite dissimilar to your mentioning of Alan Turing above, but with different, perhaps somewhat opposite, implications.

Either way, I become a part of the landscape on which this action develops. That is to say, one of those hard rocks into which the postmodernism will beat its head, breaking its neck.

That is how reality reasserts itself (among many other ways, of course) -- through purposeful human action designed to affect reality, including the hard facts of historical reality, and consequently to put these new aspects of reality in front of people, both those who like having such reality in front of them and those who don't like it.

That is what we do, with our white man fragility (among many other things that we do). My aim is not to avoid pain. This is a battle, and one has to endure. My aim is to relegate socialism to the dustbin of history -- in particular, by inflicting the postmodernists with more pain than they can endure. The victory will not come anytime soon, but it will in the end. It's a long way.