I understand the outrage, but please hear me out.

Some background on myself: I'm a Latino with a B.S. in Computer Science with a minor in Math.

I'm very good at math. Less so now but I was absolutely in the "gifted" category with math. I took a math minor because I wanted more classes I'd enjoy and knew it would help my GPA because I've aced every math class I've taken. I'm literally an A-plus math student.

So is math racist? Well it's never called me any names, so I'd say no.

Are they trying to say that "correct" is now "wrong"? No.

However, what we're talking about here is math INSTRUCTION and the culture in which we're teaching math.

Ultimately what they're attempting to address is that the way math is being taught is not reaching many students of color and white students as well!

We've been taught that rote memorization and the correct answer is the end-all-be-all, but consider the student that just memorizes but doesn't understand, or another that gets the correct answer because they made two mistakes that cancel out or the student that understands, but made an off-by-one error.

The first student will never see how this applies "to the real world" and gives up on math as interesting. Or will grow up, like many, and never know how to apply math to situations. I know friends who have "pi-r-squared" but can't find the diameter of a beach ball given a string and a measuring tape. Or they bemoan "why didn't they teach us how to do taxes???" but never understand that they were taught percentages!

The second student is worse off. They just got there by luck and that luck eventually runs out. Then math will seem arcane and mysterious. They'll say it changes and doesn't make sense. They won't learn the beauty in logical steps.

Finally, the last student, the one closest to understanding and being good at math and could even be great at math, is given a point off; just "wrong".

The way math is taught and the way we even do math isn't set in stone and can evolve. We adopted Arabic numerals because they were superior to Roman numerals. We adapted the concepts of zero, and infinity, and the concept of infinitesimal, and computer-assisted proofs when at one point they were rejected by the "math community" (or whatever that looked like at the time).

There's nothing to say that the precise way we teach math is the absolute best that there can be.

I'm assuming that like many others here, "showing your work" was the worst part of math. But reason why because teachers only cared if you approached math in the way that they understood and had taught it.

I never memorized my "times tables" because I hated rote-based math. Instead, I had internalized the concept of associativity (at the time I didn't know the name for it). So while I didn't (and still don't) have 7x8 memorized, I know 7x7 + 7 is the same, and that applies for any larger number. So while others couldn't multiply 21x21 in their head, because it was outside the range of their "times tables", I could.

I would get into fights with my math teachers constantly in elementary because my mind made leaps their teaching didn't or wouldn't account for. I matured and learned in middle and high school to backtrack and show the "baby steps" for my teacher's sake and ultimately my own sake. Our current way of teaching doesn't meet everyone's needs and doesn't encourage a deep understanding of math, its benefits, its application, and its development.

Our country bemoans how there's a STEM-shortage, but we won't analyze that there might be different and better ways (or worse ways!) to communicate math because we think it would disrupt the idea that there's only one way to do math.

Now is this (https://equitablemath.org/faq/) the right way to do that? I don't know. Probably not, but I'm also not an educator. What I can see is that the US is doing an abysmal job of teaching math and an even worse job of teaching to everyone equitably and we have to change that somehow.