Academia

Colorado College Professor: Astrophysics is Racist Due to Emphasis on Individualism and Exceptionalism

Professor Natalie Gosnell has declared that astrophysics is a racist field. That itself is not unique. We have discussed how professors like Rhode Island professor Erik Loomis have declared math, statistics, and technology as “inherently racist.” However, Gosnell’s reason is that academia continues to focus on “individualism” and “exceptionalism.”

The Colorado College blog reported:

“As an astrophysicist, I’m a product of institutions that are steeped in systemic racism and white supremacy…The [tenets] of white supremacy that show up [in physics] of individualism and exceptionalism and perfectionism… it’s either-or thinking, and there’s…no subtlety, there’s no gray area.”

The attack on individualism and exceptionalism is a growing trend. We previously discussed how “meritocracy” is racist and furthers “white supremacy.”

Professor Natalie Gosnell also objected to “metaphors” that she believes reflect a “violent” and “hypermasculine” bias. With the exception of the big bang theory, it is not clear what the violence inherent in the astrophysics field might be. The article mentions examples of this  “violent, hyper-masculine lens” as the “Vampire Star” and “Cannibal Star.”

It is not clear what might be suggested for feminine or non-violent alternatives, but there is a risk in proposing such changes since that could be seen as a play at “exceptionalism” as an academic.

121 thoughts on “Colorado College Professor: Astrophysics is Racist Due to Emphasis on Individualism and Exceptionalism”

  1. It used to be that scientists such as the incomparable Isaac Newton would honor his predecessors with statements such as “If I have seen further [than others], it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. Now it seems to be fashionable to denigrate one’s esteemed predecessors by people of modest repute. Might I suggest that if one does denigrate one’s predecessors it is only fair that a comparison should be made of the relative merits. I suspect that Prof. Gosnell’s accomplishments will be judged by her history as being minuscule compared with her predecessors. Hence her reputation will suffer accordingly. Instead one should be in awe of the patrimony that we have been bequeathed by the “giants” of the past.

  2. Shouldn’t this be filed under ‘mental illness in academia’. They need treatment, not a professorship.

    2. Anything requiring a modicum of intellectual acumen is henceforth declared racist. Welcome to the twilight zone.

  3. Well, that’s one way to ruin the hard sciences. This will give China and Russia a boost. As we dumb down and hamper our own STEM jobs with woke defeatism, our geopolitical opponents continue to invest and focus on the hard sciences, making leaps and bounds.

    The Left has taken every single action and character trait statistically associated with success, and deemed them sins.

    Eroding the value of the individual, and personal responsibility, empowers totalitarian systems like Communism and Socialism, in which the government decides what is good for the people, and the people have no right to object. See China and Iran assaulting, imprisoning, and executing those who protest the government.

    When studying, not committing crimes, waiting to have children until marriage, providing for your children (pay attention, Hunter Biden), showing up on time, and doing your best, are all considered the sins of white supremacy, then those who are raised to believe this will be low achievers, financially dependent upon the government. They will continue to vote for Democrats who provide more benefits that feed this dependency.

    1. Karen, China is way ahead of everyone when it comes to medical scientific research, particularly the number 1 killer in the world: atherosclerotic disease.

      With the exception of notable researchers in a particular field practicum 😉, like in Immuno-Cardiology, the number of published studies coming out of China is staggering. Most of their studies are garbage. They make sweeping statements and cite review articles to support their claims, as opposed to citing original research articles. They largely publish in Chinese journals written in terrible English (medical science has adopted English as the standard global language for published studies) or mediocre medical journals, which are the majority today. But the sheer volume of their published studies is formidable. On occasion they publish in highly ranked journals like Nature (see citation below this text). Yet the number of published studies based on original research coming from America, is small, very small. Given the way of Woke Religion that grammar schools, high schools and university programs have tracked, there is little reason to look to America when it comes to the medical sciences for now or the near future. America is not the scientific powerhouse it once was. Even Pfizer’s COVID vaccine wasn’t invented by Pfizer but by a small biotech started by a husband and wife team in Germany. People do not realize that Big Pharma does not invent new compounds or medical discoveries anymore. Small biotech firms do, who use Big Pharma to bring their molecules to market.

      Zhang K, Wang Y, Chen S, Mao J, Jin Y, Ye H, Zhang Y, Liu X, Gong C, Cheng X, Huang X, Hoeft A, Chen Q, Li X, Fang X. TREM2hi resident macrophages protect the septic heart by maintaining cardiomyocyte homeostasis. Nat Metab. 2023 Jan 12. doi: 10.1038/s42255-022-00715-5. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 36635449.

      1. Estovir:

        It’s very true about the trend in which successful R&D often happens at the small startup company level, but to get it through the multi-million dollar, ten year FDA approval process requires Big Pharma. The cost of the end medication has to cover the cost of all the failures in R&D, as well as merging or obtaining an IND ready for phase one FDA trials, or in vivo lab trials before that. There is one cancer drug I’ve been checking in on over the past decade or so. It can be confusing to follow it through mergers, corporate name changes, and IND name changes.

        What is most concerning is how Big Pharma has offshore much of its QC and even manufacturing. Various Asian countries are now conducting QC testing on some major American brand pharmaceuticals. There was one lab that took more than a year to pass one single assay. It seemed like madness to trust such a crucial component of drug manufacturing to another country. Compounding the problem is the stranglehold that China has on numerous critical components and active ingredients. This is true in pharmaceuticals, microchips, automotive parts, hardware manufacturing, and many other key components. “Assembled in the US” appears to be far more common than “made in the US.”

        It’s been going on for years, and we’ve been asleep at the wheel. Our vulnerability, and China’s immense leverage over most countries on the planet, is absolutely staggering. They are playing a long game, while most American politicians are playing checkers, badly.

        Here is an article from 2019, before Covid:

        https://www.cfr.org/blog/us-dependence-pharmaceutical-products-china

        “While the Department of Defense only purchases a small quantity of finished pharmaceuticals from China, about 80 percent of the active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) used to make drugs in the United States are said to come from China and other countries like India. For example, the chemical starting material used to make doxycycline, the recommended treatment for anthrax exposure, comes from China. When an influential Chinese economist earlier this year suggested that Beijing curb its exports of raw materials for vitamins and antibiotics as a countermeasure in the trade war with the United States, the worries surrounding our API dependence to China seemed to be vindicated.”

  4. A SYNTHETIC STATE PERSONAGE IN A SYNTHETIC STATE
    ___________________________________________________

    Life is good for communists whose man-woman pseudo-valor fraud is established and perpetuated by the communist welfare State.

    Life is even better for communists who benefit from state assistance, affirmative action, quotas, criminal and civil legal favor, the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” etc.

    If women are to be propped-up faux warriors, engineers, captains of industry and statesmen on crutches, who will perpetuate Americans?

    What would America look like if its women had not stopped producing a population of Americans?

    What is the duty of women to a nation, if not to make its people?

    What would the world look like if “…our Posterity…” of Americans had not lost their nerve and resolve?
    ________________________________________________________________________________

    “The sun never sets on the British Empire.”

    – George Macartney, 1773
    _____________________

    “It ain’t bragging if you can do it.”

    – Dizzy Dean
    ___________

    “[We gave you] a republic, if you can keep it.”

    – Ben Franklin
    ____________

    You couldn’t.

    Since 1860.
    _________

    “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

    – Declaration of Independence, 1776

    2. “What is the duty of women to a nation, if not to make its people?”

      Well, blessed be. If it isn’t Commander George.

  6. 1) Individualism: reason is the means of survival and the source of knowledge for man. Reason is the attribute of the individual and not the collective.
    2) Exceptionalism: equality and equivalency in skills, abilities, and talents is a myth. There will always be a hierarchy with some better than others, even if lefturd loons don’t like it. It is just a fact of reality and evasion of reality is irrational.

  7. Her LinkdIn bio tells all one need know. No mention of a serious day job in her life. Sheltered in and by academia since she entered grade school. Honors and awards galore. Typical elitist poohdoo from a classic example of a beneficiary of white privilege as defined and described in contemporary culture. This notwithstanding, don’t look for her to divest herself of her coat of many colors to assume an equity position with underachievers any time soon. That lot never will.

  8. The attack on individualism and exceptionalism is a growing trend.

    All part of cultural marxism and its “long march” through our institutions. When the march is over, the marxists will be surprised to find America has not produced human liberation as they supposed, but subservience to other stronger nations and empires . . . either that or smaller provinces controlled by brutal warlords. The warnings from history are abundant, but somehow they always believe the socialist promises.

  9. I’m surprised that the Xiden regime doesn’t have that knucklehead teaching at the Air Force Academy by now.

    1. Anonymous – you are probably correct. Some Nazis called Einstein’s Special Relativity Theory “Jewish Physics”. (“When the Nazis entered the political scene, Lenard quickly attempted to ally himself with them, joining the party at an early stage. With another physics Nobel laureate, Johannes Stark, Lenard began a core campaign to label Einstein’s Relativity as Jewish Physics.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik ) The consequent expulsion of Jewish physicists hampered Germany’s ability to develop nuclear weapons. The rejection of merit can be suicidal.

  11. If I were an alumnus of this College, I would not only withdraw any further alumni contributions, I would demand the return of my previous contributtions. This is taking ‘it’ WAY too far —- and this professor should be ‘welcomed to leave’ the college, ‘encourage’ to do so. Astrophysics as ‘racist.’ This takes the definition of racist to where it was never intended to be, and dilutes the word or concept to the ‘nano’ level — riDICulous.

  12. It’s an endless loop in an ever downward spiral for persons to think of themselves as a product of institutions that are steeped in systemic racism and white supremacy. They can never, for the whole of their lives, escape such destructive self-loathing while bearing such personal remorse for the historical and enduring fact of racism that is not their doing.

  13. Notice how all of these virtue-signalers wait until after they get their degrees and cushy jobs before they rage against the machine?

    1. Well, duuuuuuh!!!!!

      Only the “white man,” aka American, is bad, but they all want his money.

      The Israelite slaves were out of Egypt before the ink was dry on their release papers.

      It’s only natural for abductees to want to go home immediately, if not sooner.

      I’m paying my ——- RMD this month so the dependents and parasites can go on their well-deserved vacations.

  15. The racist mind colors objective nature in its own racist subjectivity. Those people shouldn’t be taken seriously.

  16. Academia’s rage against perfectionism explains why it has deteriorated so badly. I would challenge this hysterical feminist to find anything perfect in today’s academia. The “implicit bias” in her rant is that she’s assuming non-whites are all mediocre, imperfect, incompetent and unexceptional. Do these people ever examine their own racism?

  17. It amazes me how many of these so-called “educated elites” really believe this absurd line of reasoning and yet interestingly never provide any examples. I guess Professor Gosnell thinks that just saying it enough times will make it fact (sort of like the 51 Intelligence agency officials repeatedly claiming “Russian interference” to help Joe Biden get off the hook for any possible public corruption allegations before the 2020 election.) Thank you for posting this article.

  18. First of all, she’s upset by the “hyper-masculine bias” she believes is entrenched in astrophysics—-yet she says she was a post-doctoral FELLOW………..shouildn’t she have changed that to “post-doctoral BROAD”?
    And second, if she achieved all of this success and acclamation as a product of institutions that were steeped in “systemic racism and white supremacy” , then systemic racism and white supremacy must be good things, right?

    1. yet she says she was a post-doctoral FELLOW……….changed that to “post-doctoral BROAD”?

      Brilliant. It would take someone outside of the academic world to catch that salient point. And yet I never did. On that note, check out all of the female Fellows at John Hopkins (and % of underrepresented minorities)

      https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/heart_vascular_institute/education/cardiology-training-programs/

      John Hopkins Medicine HEART AND VASCULAR INSTITUTE
      Cardiovascular Disease Fellowship Program

      36%
      Fellows that are women

      20%
      Fellows that are underrepresented minorities

      1. Estovir….Thank you! It’s true. As a former schoolteacher, a lifelong mother and housewife, (and now granny) like most of my ilk, there’s a natural tendency to cut to the chase. When you’re across the room from the big picture, you can see it much better.
        The first person to call “BS” on most things will almost always be someone who has spent alot of time with children!

  19. Resident of the Colorado Springs area here. CC is and has been for a very long time a school for the spoiled brat white children of very rich parents. Tuition has always been the most expensive in Colorado, the campus is elaborate and pretentious, the sports teams, composed of those sports enjoyed by upper class whites, etc. All of this is to say that it is completely the bastion of the deranged white liberal, full of ridiculous notions of the world but as I’m sure is the case with this professor, very happy to indulge these ideas while being paid very handsomely while living a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle in the Old North End of Colorado Springs.
    These people are the epitome of hypocrisy and lack of integrity. They truly are the basest, most devolved creatures of our time. Worthless Honorius, the Roman Emperor who fed his pet birds in the imperial court at Ravenna while the Empire collapsed around him, was a more honorable and heroic character than any of the people typified by Professor Gosnell.

    2. tomhoser——Good one!
      Our family has a black lab named “Black Labs Matter”.

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