A brief thought on what happened here, and on how it relates to the larger "crisis in the humanities" (scare quotes because it deserves them" 1/many https://twitter.com/piney_the/status/1278164646726447104

I suspect what her colleagues were relying on is the extensive body of work by social scientists and humanities scholars exploring structural racism and implicit bias. The OP insisted that they each individually be able to prove these theories, and they couldn't. 2/

To her this was PROOF that they're made up nonsense! If you can't provide evidence off-hand they're not real! Science chauvinists love doing this. If any given individual cannot provide the evidence for a social science or critical theory then the whole thing is made up! 3/

But here's the thing: I cannot, offhand, prove a single theory from chem or physics or bio. Nor does anyone expect me to! I learned some math proofs in high school, but beyond the Pythagorean I couldn't reproduce a single one on command.

We trust that mathematicians and scientists with years of study and expertise have proved these things! And moreover, we SHOULD trust that - we have to trust expertise. Otherwise each individual would have to learn the entirety of human knowledge by experiment from scratch.

(side note: yes we also need to continually question these bodies of knowledge, I hope that goes without saying - our conclusions need to be tested by those with the skills to test it. Why yes I have been reading Vine Deloria Jr, why do you ask?)

This all seems pretty self evident - I doubt the OP would find it proof positive that her work is nonsense if I couldn't prove it offhand. It relied on years of study and huge bodies of knowledge! I don't even know how to ENGAGE with that knowledge.

But some in the STEM fields have a truly WILD level of disdain for the social sciences and (especially) the humanities. Because we use evidence they can understand, because we're talking about their every day experiences, they somehow assume there's no expertise.

An architect friend once pointed out it was really hard for her (especially as a short woman) to establish authority because since everyone walks into and uses buildings, everyone feels like an expert on them. We all know and read history, so we all must be experts.

So her assumption is that there couldn't possibly be a body of evidence she's not engaging with. There couldn't possibly be expertise and years of study that went into these conclusions. If her colleagues can't prove them immediately, then they're made up.

Her colleagues trusted that body of knowledge, and trusted the scholars who produced it. I sure wish her colleagues had referred her to those studies, but they didn't. Math isn't invalid because I would need to refer you to an expert to prove it. Neither are social theories!

As a side note I think this is where much of the truly insane technical language of social/critical theory comes from. Sure, it's short hand that makes it easier to quickly convey an idea. But a lot of it is gatekeeping, proving that there IS expertise involved.

And perhaps if there wasn't this kind of condescension and dismissal, scholars wouldn't feel a need to be assholes defending their ivory towers. I try to never adopt that posture - to speak plainly, to value non-academic knowledge, to engage with the world.

But it's hard when the validity and value of your research is constantly undermined. When you have people like this saying "well, if you can't prove Kimberlé Crenshaw RIGHT NOW intersectionality isn't real" (bad example since it's actually easy to prove but you get the point)

Anyway, the end of this thread is that the humanities and social sciences matter, and don't let people like this undermine that. This is just the academic version of that time a bunch of silicone valley jerks thought they'd invented the bus, or taxes.