March Issue v

centerfold 7
The White
Man’s Time
By ANNA WETZEL ‘22
Relics of the Bryn Mawr and Haverford
student strikes grace classroom
walls and Instagram pages.
Among these, a sign prompting “Are you
teaching the White man’s science?” followed
by an urgent demand –“Decolonize
STEM!”– remains posted to a glass wall in
the Park Science Building on Bryn Mawr’s
campus.
This message challenges us to diversify
the disciplines through which we
spatially and temporally explore the physical
world: science, technology, engineering,
and math. In addition to the equitable
representation of minorities within these
fields, the decolonization of STEM may
require a far more profound reconsideration
of our very understanding of space
and time.
Through the Western educational system,
science is presented as universal, objective
truth. This call to action prompts us,
instead, to reframe science as a constructed
discipline and an element of Western culture,
and therefore reflective of White supremacy
and patriarchy. From the figures
we acclaim to the theorems we memorize,
our study of the physical world through the
fields of math and science is dominated by
Whiteness.
Of course, many women and people
of color have made important contributions
to the disciplines of science, technology,
engineering, and math. However, decolonization
requires more than the inclusion
of underrepresented minorities within
fields defined by European ideas, figures,
and histories. To decolonize STEM is to
reconsider the lens through which we explore
these disciplines on a fundamental
level, clarifying and dismantling the Eurocentric
roots of our most basic understandings
of space and time.
A train ride away, Philadelphia-based
Afrofuturist artist and lawyer Rasheedah
Phillips is doing the very work the students
of Bryn Mawr College called to action.
Phillips is the co-founder of Black
Quantum Futurism, a collective dedicated
to understanding of space and time beyond
the Eurocentric framework we’ve been
taught in school.
Eurocentric conceptions of time, as
taught in the Western school system, follow
the Ancient Roman Gregorian (12
month) calendar and chronologically follow
the past, present and future. Phillips’s
scholarship, in contrast, centers the exploration
of time in African cultural traditions.
This includes Sasa: the recent past,
present, and immediate future– periods of
time that reflect lived, embodied experience.
Conversely, the Zamani period refers
to a deeper, more profound past, famously
referred to as the “graveyard of time” by
Kenyan philosopher John Mbiti.
The Black Quantum Futurism Collective’s
work includes elaborate art installations,
ambitious research endeavors, and
digital zines. Most recently, the collective
won a grant through CERN, the world’s
largest particle physics laboratory, to extend
their research on quantum physics
and produce accompanying artwork. Much
of the collective’s work provides avenues
for the contextualization of these abstract,
philosophical concepts within our lived experiences
and daily practices. One of their
printable magazines equips users with the
tools for “Do-It-Yourself Time Travel”
through a series of reflective prompts and
curated soundscapes.
As traditional African understandings
of time tend to be cyclical –following agricultural,
ecological, and economic cycles–
the work of Phillips and her collective
encourages deep personal and ancestral
reflection as a form of navigation through
time.
Now more than ever, delineation in
time feels more suggestive than concrete.
Days bleed into one another; schedules and
deadlines blur. As put by mathematician
Joseph Mazur in April of 2020, the world
is “beginning to be lost in time.” Phillips’
work invites us to learn from this moment
of temporal fluidity and in doing so, challenge
our Western notions of time as linear.
The work of Black Quantum Futurism
calls for a radical expansion of our
understanding of the physical realm. A
higher representation of minorities within
traditional STEM fields (and knowledge
of their past achievements) is certainly one
goal, but the collective’s purpose is to challenge
Western thought on a broader scale,
and open itself up to non-Eurocentric notions
of time.
I encourage my peers to challenge
their own understanding of traditional
Western conceptions of time and space
through further investigation into Phillips’
scholarship and activism. An anonymous
college student, simply by scrawling a
slogan on a piece of paper and affixing it
to the wall of a Bryn Mawr College classroom,
has challenged the American educational
system to expand the framework
through which we understand the physical
universe.
Graphics and design by Maggie Song ‘21
Photography by Megan Cooper ‘21 and Trisha Yun ‘23