From the Department of Woke comes this science humdinger…
The American Physical Society says you can't refute the existence of white privilege in physics using science
nationalpost.com
(Paywall may apply)
Doesn't make sense. A whiteboard is a void, a blank space of nothing useful. It isn't until a black marker is brought to bear that anything useful is set upon it.
Paywall did apply so I don't know how Krauss came to the headline that ". . .whiteboards are racist . . ." A reference to his article on another site indicates that he gets this contention from a paper published in 2022.
Having long ago come to the conclusion that manufactured outrage is the enemy of nuance, I usually prefer to read original sources to make my own conclusions rather that depending on truncated interpretations of secondhand analyses. However, if you want to be really bored (and perplexed) by a "case study" that probably only came to the attention of most who've read it because of "racist whiteboards", then here it is.
Observing whiteness in introductory physics: A case study
Whiteness shapes many practices in physics classrooms that are often thought to be neutral.
journals.aps.org
"Whiteboard" is used 25 times in the paper. Does it say that the item is racist? Here's some examples of the authors use of the term.
"We name mechanisms that facilitate the reproduction of whiteness in this local context, including a particular representation of energy, physics values, whiteboards, gendered social norms, and the structure of schooling."
Whiteboards feature prominently in the course; what is represented on the group’s whiteboard is often what gets oriented to in the large-group share-out.
Paired with other mechanisms of control (like the use of whiteboards and the structure of schooling), it organizes activity around itself, makes it possible for a single person to maintain control (and makes natural ways to keep others from gaining control), centralizes the credit in the person with the most access to it, and suggests discursive frames that make this seem normal (he understands it, he was the closest to it).
3. Whiteboards
Entangled with the above is the use of whiteboards as a primary pedagogical tool. Though whiteboards have been shown to have a number of affordances when they are used as a collaborative tool that all members have access to [88], in this episode, they also play a role in reconstituting whiteness as social organization. In particular, whiteboards display written information for public consumption; they draw attention to themselves and in this case support the centering of an abstract representation and the person standing next to it, presenting. They collaborate with white organizational culture [89], where ideas and experiences gain value (become more central) when written down.
Most of the other uses of the word are describing individuals going to the item, writing on the item, or holding the item's marker.
My skepticism about the paper's
methodology and conclusions quality (my uneducated opinion only) does not entirely rule out the importance of what the authors may have been trying to say. However, their approach has likely opened them to this ridicule. Despite a commentator ascribing racist whiteboards to a "woke physics journal" instead of the paper's authors (lots of stupid shit gets published in journals), the "journal" (PHYSICAL REVIEW PHYSICS EDUCATION RESEARCH) did cite the paper in an editorial.
Editorial: Research on Advancing Equity Is Critical for Physics
Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 18, 010001 (2022)
journals.aps.org
The editorial did not use the word 'whiteboard' at all.
By the way, the original article did not use the term 'blackboard' anywhere in the paper. Unsurprisingly, there are generations who have never seen that teaching tool.