Beyond Banneker: Black Mathematicians and the Paths to Excellence

Chapter 3. Navigating the Mason-Dixon Divide

43 three Navigating the Mason-Dixon Divide In this chapter, I use the notion of the Mason-Dixon Line—a now hypothetical but at one time very literal divide between North and South—as a metaphor for the border states in which Black mathematicians have frequently found themselves. These borders—physical, sociological, and psychological —have a significant impact on the mathematical lives of Black mathematicians. I begin with the literal geographical divide between South and North, largely by exploring the importance of the South as an incubator for mathematics talent among Black Americans, as previously described by some mathematicians who came of age there. The South has a particular connotation in American notions of liberty and opportunity as the site of rigid and violent racial repression, but it is also the site of strong Black educational and cultural institutions. I then explore this divide figuratively, by discussing Black mathematicians ’ navigation between Black and White institutions, focusing on those who desegregated, or were among the first to desegregate, formerly all-White secondary schools and colleges and universities. Finally, I describe the internal , psychological boundaries that Black mathematicians are compelled to navigate beginning early in adolescence. In describing these psychological boundaries, I discuss how Black mathematicians’ racial identities (Cross, 1991; Helms, 1990) are related to their mathematics identities. As Martin (2006) suggests, one’s mathematical identity “encompasses the dispositions and deeply held beliefs that individuals develop about their ability to participate and perform effectively in mathematical contexts and to use mathematics to change the conditions of their lives. A mathematics identity encompasses a 44 Beyond Banneker person’s self understanding as well as how they are constructed by others in the context of doing mathematics” (p. 206). Martin and others (e.g., Boaler & Greeno, 2000; Nasir & Saxe, 2003) see mathematics identity as continually under construction and as being rooted in cultural, community, school, sociohistorical, and interpersonal contexts. Several mathematics education researchers (e.g., Berry, 2008; Hand, 2010; Martin, 2006; Nasir, 2000; Stinson, 2006) have demonstrated that mathematics identities, particularly for students of color, are formed, re-formed, and affected by dominant social, political, and media discourses concerning race, achievement, and mathematics. U.S. Black mathematicians, as members of a minority group within a small professional subset of individuals who are predominantly White and male, often find themselves navigating within largely White environments throughout their mathematical lives. For Black women, who are even more of a minority within the context of the professional community of mathematicians, these issues become magnified—but, as it turns out, later in their educational careers. They face a compelling divide in that their gender becomes increasingly salient to how they are perceived as mathematics doers. Thus, this chapter focuses on the experiences Black mathematicians have during early and late adolescence—when they are in high school and college . As we will see, identity formation during these years is a profound and fundamental part of their later professional identities and how they navigate graduate school and professional environments, to be described in chapter 4: Representing the Race. Coming of Age in the American South: “We Were Negroes Then” More than half of the mathematicians interviewed for this book have roots in the South—a region that has been a site of both oppression and opportunity for Black Americans. As described in the preceding chapter, many Black mathematicians’ formative experiences with mathematics—in one-room schoolhouse classrooms, in all-Black and predominantly White educational settings, in rural areas, towns, and cities—took place in the South. Despite state-sanctioned and rigidly enforced policies of discrimination and inequality for most of the United States’ history, the majority of Black colleges— which 18 of the 35 mathematicians interviewed for this book attended—are located there. Even for Black mathematicians who were not born or educated in the South, the South is often a key reference point in how they experience and Navigating the Mason-Dixon Divide 45 make sense of their childhoods and their paths to becoming mathematicians. As David Blackwell noted, Centralia, Illinois, where he grew up was “not north of the Mason-Dixon Line”—not quite South, with its virulent racism and violence, but not quite the land of the free and the “promised land” of the North, either. Mathematicians who grew up in Maryland or Washington , DC, also describe those locations as “neither South nor North”—“even though Washington was considered South, you know, it wasn’t southern...