Science Doesn't Belong to White People — It Belongs to Everyone

a pretty cool story today about the canadian astronaut jeremy hansen who had an indigenous artist design his mission patch to represent the contributions of first nations cultures and you know different ways that that their culture and people groups have inspired and informed his work and he'll be taking some of that some of that experience from talking with different groups with him as he goes to the moon and becomes one of the first Canadians to go to the moon.

And I think it's a great story.

Love it.

Notice the way this new story talks about other ways of knowing.

I'm seeing this phrase, other ways of knowing, in quite a lot of contexts to refer to, especially indigenous ways of thinking about the world.

And I think that phrase, other ways of knowing, gets things kind of wrong, frames things in kind of an unhelpful and incorrect way.

where science is like a white people thing, science is a European thing, and other ways of knowing are just other, they're just different from that.

I don't think that's the way it really works because science belongs to everybody, right?

Like science had a head start in Europe because of military advances and things like that, but science belongs to everybody.

There are scientists in every country, every culture, every language on earth, and it's not a white or European thing.

And I think this framing of scientific ways of knowing as a white or European thing is disrespectful to people from other cultures, other countries, other languages that, you know, like that downplays their contributions and their ability to participate in science.

And it also downplays the fact that, you know, white and European cultures have quote unquote, other ways of knowing.

And I don't think other ways of knowing is the right way to talk about those things.

What we're talking about there is culture, traditions, folklore.

I mean, Europeans gave you witches and Santa Claus.

We have folklore and other traditions and things like that.

So I think it's really dichotomous and incorrect to see science as a white thing or as a European thing and to see everybody else as having other ways of knowing.

We all have multiple ways of knowing and one that we can all use is science.

And science really is the only way of knowing in the proper sense.

Science doesn't know everything.

Science doesn't get everything right the first time.

but science is self-correcting.

And if you know something that is different from what science knows, like it's just not correct, right?

There are other ways of experiencing the world, other ways of thinking about things.

And certainly science can't answer all types of questions.

You know, like there are lots of things that matter to us a great deal as humans that we have to think about and decide in ways that don't involve science.

So like, I'm not downplaying that, but I'm saying, when science differs from another quote unquote way of knowing science is right.

That's just the reality of it.

So like if, if, you know, your grandma said, put an onion.

under your armpit when you're sick and that'll help you get better like you can do that if you want but we're still going to rely on medical science to tell us how you know how to actually conduct you know health care and things like that so i just think we have to not insult scientists from other cultures i think we have to not treat science as a white thing and i think we have to not downplay the fact that we all have culture we all have beliefs we all have traditions And it's not like science versus those that other people have.

Science belongs to everybody.

Let me know what you think.