The Collapse of Tension

On Prescod-Weinstein's "White Empiricism"

This is, after all, a philosophy blog.

One of my friends, who hails from what you might call “the right” sent me this paper. And, against my better judgement, I read the whole thing. Then I popped a THC gummie, waited half an hour, and went back and read it again. Then I started to write. This is what I took away.

I have a great deal of frustration with hyper-identity politics. I think it's a dangerous, self-defeating way to cognize the world around you. When combined with intellectual discourse, it becomes a kind of intellectual arson. Where somehow, subject position and social power structures (real or perceived) become the primary lens through which to establish veracity. This is very dangerous. Not the least of which because so much of it is so absurd on its face, and is then weaponized by the reactionary right to discredit all intellectual discourse, I cannot turn my head away from it.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's paper “Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism” represents nothing less than an assault on reason disguised as liberation. It is a masterclass in academic obscurantism—a paper that satiates the contemporary appetite for grievance while simultaneously poisoning the intellectual well from which genuine progress might drink.

Let me be unambiguous: the historical exclusion of Black women from physics has been a moral failure and an intellectual loss. But to remedy this injustice by declaring empiricism itself—the very foundation of scientific inquiry—to be racialized is to burn down the house to rid it of termites. It is an approach so catastrophically misguided that one wonders whether the goal is inclusion at all, or merely the satisfaction of watching the edifice of scientific methodology collapse into rubble.

What Prescod-Weinstein has accomplished here is a remarkable feat of intellectual sleight of hand. She begins with the unimpeachable observation that Black women have been excluded from physics, then performs a daring triple somersault of logic to arrive at the conclusion that empiricism itself is “white.” Follow this reasoning, if you can: since some white physicists dismiss Black women's experiences of racism while simultaneously entertaining post-empiricist approaches to string theory, empiricism must therefore be a racialized practice that advantages white men.

This is not argument; it is alchemy—transforming base logical fallacies into academic gold through the mystical process of critical theory jargon. It conflates the social dynamics of scientific communities with the methodological principles of scientific inquiry in ways that would make even the most committed postmodernist blush.

The paper's central concept of “white empiricism” is defined as the phenomenon whereby “only white people (particularly white men) are read as having a fundamental capacity for objectivity.” But empiricism isn't about who is doing the observing; it's about the method of observation. The irony here is spectacular: in attempting to advocate for Black women's recognition as capable observers, Prescod-Weinstein undermines the very principle that would guarantee that recognition—the empirical commitment that observation should be evaluated based on methodological rigor rather than the observer's identity.

Consider the paper's central parallel: Prescod-Weinstein suggests an equivalence between string theorists considering post-empiricist approaches and white physicists dismissing Black women's experiences of racism. This comparison isn't merely flawed; it's intellectually dishonest.

The string theory debate concerns how to proceed when empirical evidence is currently unobtainable due to technological limitations. It's a methodological question about the frontiers of theoretical physics, with legitimate arguments on both sides. Experiences of racism, meanwhile, are empirical realities that should be taken seriously—but they involve social observations rather than particle detections. The methodological questions are entirely different.

What makes this particularly absurd is that the critique of string theory's drift away from empiricism has been forcefully articulated by women physicists themselves. Sabine Hossenfelder, a prominent theoretical physicist, has been among the most vocal critics of string theory's lack of empirical foundation. In her book which I read last year, “Lost in Math,” Hossenfelder systematically dismantles the aesthetic arguments for string theory and calls for a return to empiricism. Her critique—which aligns precisely with the empiricist position Prescod-Weinstein frames as “white”—demonstrates that the commitment to evidence-based science knows no gender or racial boundaries.

To suggest that physicists' willingness to debate post-empiricism in string theory while being skeptical of claims about racism represents a contradiction is to fundamentally misunderstand both domains. It's akin to accusing someone of hypocrisy for using different criteria to evaluate a mathematical proof and a poem. The categories are simply not commensurable.

The most tragic aspect of this paper is how thoroughly it undermines its own purported aims. If the goal is to increase Black women's participation in physics—a goal with which any reasonable person would agree—then attacking the methodological foundations of physics is a strategy so counterproductive that it borders on sabotage.

Einstein's principle of covariance tells us that the laws of physics are the same for all observers regardless of their frame of reference. This principle should be the rallying cry for inclusion—the scientific guarantee that Black women's observations are just as valid as anyone else's when conducted with methodological rigor. Instead, Prescod-Weinstein uses this principle to argue that different identity groups might have fundamentally different relationships to physical reality, undermining the very universality that would secure equal standing.

The paper's assertion that “white empiricism” leads to “antiempiricism masquerading as an empirical approach” is a rhetorical ouroboros—a snake eating its own tail. If empiricism itself is suspect because of its alleged “whiteness,” then on what methodological ground are we to stand when identifying discrimination? The very tools needed to objectively document bias are themselves cast as biased, creating an intellectual quicksand from which no solid conclusion can emerge.

A more intellectually honest approach would acknowledge both the universality of physical laws and the social contingencies of how we investigate them. It would recognize that the laws of physics are universal and equally accessible to all observers; that the scientific method remains our most powerful tool for understanding physical reality; that social factors influence which questions get asked, which research gets funded, and who gets to participate; and that these social factors have historically excluded Black women in ways that have impoverished physics.

This approach doesn't require abandoning empiricism or suggesting that different identity groups have fundamentally different relationships to physical reality. Instead, it allows us to identify discrimination while maintaining that the ultimate goal is equal access to a shared project of understanding the universe.

The paper's sophistry is not merely wrong; it's dangerous. It provides ammunition to those who would dismiss legitimate concerns about discrimination as mere identity politics run amok. It confirms the worst suspicions of those already skeptical about academia's commitment to truth rather than ideology. And most damaging of all, it suggests to young Black women interested in physics that the discipline itself is so fundamentally compromised by racism that it might not be worth pursuing.

What we need is not the racialization of empiricism but its democratization—ensuring that everyone, regardless of background, has the opportunity to participate in the empirical investigation of reality. This requires addressing very real barriers of discrimination, bias, and limited access to resources. It requires recognizing that diverse perspectives can lead to new questions and approaches. But it does not require declaring the methodological foundations of science to be inherently “white.”

Our soul is meaning. Constructed, such as it is. And meaning emerges not from collapsing tension but from holding it productively—from standing in the gap between universal truth and particular experience, between what we know and how we know it.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And the universe reveals its secrets to anyone who asks the right questions, regardless of who they are—but who gets to ask those questions has been unjustly constrained by social forces that we must confront with both moral clarity and methodological rigor.

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To go deeper, explore The Philosophy of the Circus—my living document that weaves my ideas into a single, evolving framework. Or step beyond the simulation and into The Mythology of the Circus, where meaning and metaphor intertwine.