Translator: Thaiane Vaz Reviewer: David DeRuwe I’m Katemari, and I’m a physics professor. Yes, physics, that’s right . .
. physics, the class I know many of you love . .
. (Laughter) just like me. I decided to be a physicist when I was eight years old, and I’ll tell you part of the story of how I decided to become a physicist.
When I was young, at school, we had a thing we called a questionnaire - at least in Porto Alegre, where I grew up, that’s what we called it. This was in the 80′s. I don’t know if you did that, but we used a big spiral notebook, and we wrote on the first page: “This is a questionnaire of this or that.
Answer each question with sincerity. ” And then, we would place one question on each page: What is your name? Write your favorite fruit.
Write your favorite color. What do you want to be when you grow up? I answered that question without hesitation: astrophysicist.
The thing was I loved looking at the sky, seeing the stars and the moon. I don’t know if the fact that Halley’s Comet passed by when I was a child influenced this fascination of mine, but I know that I thought: “I want to become an astronomer. ” At my house, my mother bought many books, so we had lots of books and an encyclopedia at home, We didn’t have internet like we do today.
I would browse through an encyclopedia, and I’d also go to the public school library in the Partenon neighborhood where I lived. It was there that I began to read about astronomy, and somehow I deduced that astrophysics was something similar to astronomy, only harder. So, I decided that was it, I wanted to be an astrophysicist, done.
And I moved on with my life. Later, when I was in high school, everyone was struggling: “Oh my God, what will I do with my life? ” At the time, we were taking the college entrance exams, and I felt confident because I knew I wanted to be an astrophysicist; I wanted to study astrophysics.
But when I looked at the courses offered at Federal University of Rio Grande Do Sul, I found out they didn’t have an astronomy or astrophysics program, but they did have physics, which is the course people usually do when they want to pursue a career in astrophysics. So that was it. I’d take physics.
And that’s how I ended up taking the physics course, Then in my undergraduate program, I was taking my classes, and finally, I got a chance to take astrophysics . . .
I hated it. (Laughter) I detested it. It was really boring.
I had many friends in astrophysics. I saw them working in the lab, spending hours and hours in front of the computer, and I thought that would be such a drag. I didn’t want that, but I already liked many other things about physics, because physics is very beautiful, with so many wonderful things.
Throughout my life, I’ve studied in excellent institutions: I went to high school at a federal public school, and I did my undergraduate work at a federal public university, the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. As an undergraduate, I did an internship at Imperial College, in London. After graduating, I did my master’s at a federal public university, UFBA, the Federal University of Bahia.
For my PhD, I went to the US and studied at Columbia University, which is a university that is part of the Ivy League, a group of eight of the best US universities, and Columbia is among the best universities in the world. Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly solo over the Atlantic, studied there. Isaac Asimov, considered to be one of the fathers of science fiction, also studied there.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist - his astrophysics are even cool for some people - is also a promoter of science, and he’s the director of New York’s Hayden Planetarium. He studied at Columbia. Obama also studied at Columbia.
And then I came back to Brazil; I came back with my PhD. I knew a bunch of stuff, right, I knew everything. And here I was, a Black woman, in a country where only 3% of the universities have racial equity in their academic staff.
Racial equity is when the racial distribution is similar to the racial distribution of that state. And when we talk about Brazilian federal universities, the number of universities that have racial equity is zero. It was in this context I found myself as a federal university professor, at UFBA.
When I started working there, I met a professor, was greeted by her, and she was from the Chemistry Institute. This was Professor Bárbara Karine Pinheiro. She invited me to teach a class with her, and I agreed.
We started teaching this class, and we had a student, a Black student. Professor Bárbara Karine, is a Black woman, and this student, Getúlio Rocha Silva, did a really cool work, very interesting. Getúlio was a mathematics graduate and was studying the Pythagorean theorem.
So, I read his work, and he said a lot of things about the Pythagorean theorem. Do you remember the Pythagorean theorem? You know, that thing about the square, the hypotenuse, and whatever.
You remember, right? You use it everyday. (Laughter) A thing like that, which we use, right?
Pythagorean theorem. Then he says that the Pythagorean theorem is not by Pythagoras. And I thought: “For the love of God, I have a PhD from Columbia.
I know the Pythegoream theorem is by Pythegoras. ” I learned that. You learned that.
We all know the theorem is by Pythagoras. But I was very curious, and I wanted to know more about it, so I read the sources he used and went to research it more. I understood more and more, and then I saw that .
. . Oh my God, my world collapsed.
I saw that the mathematical relationships described in the Pythagoran theorem were written way before him, by the Egyptians, Babylonians, Indians. I almost couldn’t believe what I was seeing, and I kept wondering: “Why didn’t I know about this? ” It was from this moment, this very first step, that I started to research and to question other knowledge I thought I already had, but didn’t - things I thought I knew but was wrong.
I knew it was wrong because I had been taught wrong. They had lied to me my whole life about many science, mathematics, and technology issues. Who here has heard about the great navigations?
A lot of people, right, have heard of the great navigations. And we learn that it was the Europeans who came first, who first crossed the Atlantic. Right?
Only thing is that people from the African continent had already done this crossing, before the Europeans, and we have records from Europeans talking about these crossings. There is a European explorer, Vasco Nunes Balboa, who talked about when he first got here, about having found Black people who came from Ethiopia. So this crossing had already been done.
This is in books, registry books. It’s not something that is kept secret, but no one had ever told me that. I never saw that in a textbook.
Why don’t we learn about that? What makes a group of people make up a bunch of lies about who did what, about who created what, about intellectual creations? Why not talk about the African people who made great discoveries in mathematics?
Why not talk about the great development of naval engineering technology that African people made when they crossed the Atlantic? It’s too much, right? There are too many PhDs and too many fancy schools for me not to know that African people had a 365-day calendar.
This was about 2000, 3000 years before Christ. We’re in 2022, so that’s 2000 years of the Christian era. 5000 years ago, the Egyptians already had a 365-day calendar.
We don’t learn about that in school. And the answer for us not knowing about these things is very simple: to recognize these productions, these creations, this genius is to recognize the humanity of Black people. It’s removing from Europe this pretense of centrality and intellectual superiority.
The colonial period was characterized by this European undertaking of making everything that wasn’t European smaller - the beautiful, the intelligent - which was intended to be the model. The way of thinking, loving, acting, and existing had to be European. Whatever wasn’t European was inferior, inhuman uncivilized, ugly, incapable, and primitive.
These ideas and these ideals, forged who I am and who you are - who we are, everybody. It’s from this colonial ideology that white people, deep down, feel superior, smarter, more deserving of everything. And Black people feel inferior.
They see themselves as smaller, less capable, and like they don’t belong in certain spaces. In 2016, the Oxford dictionary elected the word “post-truth” as their word of the year. Every year, the Oxford dictionary elects a word as their word of the year.
and post-truth means: “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. ” And I feel that in the field of science, we are living in a continuous post-truth situation, in which these anti-Black emotions and the personal beliefs of white superiority make the objective facts of science’s history to be less important when we teach and learn about things that happened in human history. And this helps reinforce and maintain colonial ideas, even if the colonial period has already ended.
Coloniality is the maintenance of ideas, practices, and colonial thoughts. And it’s everywhere. It’s in our daily interactions.
it’s present in our lives, and we need to be aware of these processes of coloniality. We must make a great effort to point out how detrimental this issue really is, because it’s unnatural for us to notice the effects of coloniality. If perhaps you haven’t thought about the effects of coloniality on our existence, and particularly in science, now you can’t deny it.
You dared to know, coming here today or watching the video online, so from now on, you have a responsibility. Science, with its pretense of certainty, is done by people, common people, like you and me, who have prejudices, and we reproduce these prejudices many times without even thinking about it. I invite you, today, to practice the exercise of looking to see how much colonial thoughts may be influencing what you do, manifesting itself in daily situations, or appearing in news we watch or in a public debate that we witness.
Here, online, or wherever you are watching, teachers and professors are in attendance. There are many teachers and professors. So for those of you who are academic staff, like me, I invite you for a specific challenge, which is for us to constantly reevaluate our classes, which, in fact I know is a difficult challenge, but it is necessary for us to reevaluate our classes - the content, the curriculum.
I always ask myself if I’m doing something that’s reproducing an idea, a thought, or a colonial practice. That’s a very important thing to do for Black people as much as it is for non-Black people. I, well-educated and well-informed, discovered I didn’t know as much as I thought I knew.
When I was eight years old, and answered my questionnaire, the questionnaire where I was completely certain I wanted to be an astrophysicist, I didn’t even hesitate. Nowadays, I’m not so certain. Now, all the time, I’m trying to learn and relearn things.
I revisit concepts, discovering and unpacking lies I’ve been told, and I understand what I need to learn, looking at the new things in the world. Still, by comprehending the processes of science, I trust in science, and I trust in scientific knowledge, and in a way of understanding the world through science. But I also understand that there is still a lot for us to know.
It was from the moment I received the academic welcoming from my colleague, Bárbara, who shared with me so generously and from rigorous research made by Getúlio that I started to realize how much more I needed to know. So now I leave you with an ethical, moral, and practical challenge of searching for knowledge, of relearning from non-colonial milestones, and above all, enjoying the generosity of Black and Indigenous peoples who at all times are sharing their knowledge with us. We have the responsibility to break with the lies that they told us and to recreate new possibilities of existence for us and for whoever is coming next.
