There's an aspect of this 2+2 thing that I think is really important and that has generally been overlooked, so you know what that means:
(thread) WHAT IS ACTUALLY *RACIST* ABOUT 2+2?
1/

Normally when we talk about racism and "2+2" we focus on educational systems and their associated values and structures, or about data and numerical ways of viewing the world. Those are crucial to understand the relationship between 2+2 and racism. 2/

But I want to talk not about 2+2 as a metaphor or a stand-in for a system or a way of viewing the world. I want to talk about 2+2 *specifically* and its part as a key ingredient in the history of scientific racism. 3/

First, how can a specific fact of arithmetic be racist?
There are lots of ways of defining racism; a useful starting point is @DrIbram 's definition of a racist idea as "suggesting one racial group is inferior or superior to another" to "explain racial inequities in society" 4/

It turns out that the fact "2+2=4" had a specific historical role in defining and explaining racial differences starting in the mid-19th century, in ways that continue to be felt today. 5/

As it happens, I've published some articles on this: https://twitter.com/MBarany/status/1291371390243930112 6/

Let's go back to the 1850s, when Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton is just starting to make a name for himself as an adventurous explorer. If you're rich and English circa 1850, you assemble a team and go to the "uncharted" regions of southern Africa 7/

Just because the regions are unknown to English folks like Galton, doesn't mean they are unoccupied. In fact, there are lots of people living in southern Africa and Galton's interactions with them end up being really formative for his scientific and personal identity 8/

Galton's party relies on trade with the people they encounter to get supplies (especially food) they need to survive. This is hard, because they don't speak the same language and they have different customs and expectations. 9/

We only have Galton's testimony for how most of these trades went, but let's try for a moment to put ourselves in the place of a shepherd on the other end of one of them. 10/

Some foreign guy wants one of your sheep. After a lot of pointing and gesticulating you agree he can take one in exchange for two sticks of tobacco. He then drops a bunch of tobacco in front of you and starts to take away not one but *two* of your sheep! 11/

You may be thinking: hey, fartface, I did not agree that you could take two sheep.
But you don't speak the same language, so you go back to pointing and gesticulating and maybe showing a bit of being upset about this guy's presumption. 12/

But you don't get to tell your story in a popular adventure book on your return to England. That's Galton's wheelhouse, and here's how he describes what happens.... 13/

When Galton writes about what happened, he claims you agreed to give him as many sheep as he wanted at a rate of 2 sticks of tobacco per sheep. He claims he proceeded to give you 4 sticks of tobacco for 2 sheep. 14/

Most importantly, he claims you got upset and backed out of the deal *because you were too stupid to understand that 2+2 = 4*.
You cannot refute this because Galton is back in England and he doesn't even give you a name in this story. 15/

Nevermind that in the very same part of his adventure story Galton tells other tales that clearly show people from your community dealing with numbers greater than 4. 16/

Nevermind that "can't count the fingers of their own hand" was an old insult used to denigrate the poor and rural people of England long before it ever became a matter of race and racism. 17/

In Galton's adventure story, "can't add 2 and 2 to make 4" is Galton's way of saying the people he was interacting with were of a different and inferior race. 18/

Now, I've actually looked at Galton's notebooks and letters home from this expedition. This story appears in his published adventure story, but there is absolutely nothing to back it up in Galton's archive. Lots about trade. Lots about language. Nothing about 2+2. 19/

So it's most likely that our earlier empathy experiment about a trade-gone-wrong was based on some even more complicated scenario than 2+2=4, and Galton imported the 2+2 part to tap into more homespun prejudice about counting up to five. 20/

But what's most important is not where the story came from but where it went next.
Galton's book had about 1000 copies printed, but many more people read the 2+2 story as excerpted in full in a review in the Athanaeum, a preeminent London high-society periodical. 21/

Readers of the Athanaeum excerpt found Galton's story striking and memorable and, above all, amusing. This story stuck around because it was genuinely funny for posh Londoners to picture some African "savage" struggling with 2+2.
22/

Galton couldn't have predicted what would happen next with his story, but a shift in context ended up radically changing its meaning and sealing its place in the history of racism. 23/

In the decade after Galton returned from Africa, for reasons that historians of science have studied in great detail, there was a major shift in how gentlemen in England thought about "savages" of Africa, having something to do with Galton's cousin Charles Darwin. 24/

To make a long story short, the story of humanity took on a long evolutionary timescale rather than a short historical timescale. Gentleman scholars started asking about this new category of human time: "prehistory"
25/

The problem is, by definition, you can't go back and read the records left by prehistoric humans, and you definitely can't go and talk to them.
So these gentlemen start looking around for people they can study in place of prehistoric ancestors. 26/

Historian Peter Bowler called this the transformation of "savage" into "primitive": take far away people from your own time who you can talk to and negotiate over sheep with and analyze them as though they are survivals of a long-lost past. 27/

Prehistory was one of the key branches of scientific racism in the latter part of the 19th century, connected to all sorts of debates about whether humans came from a common ancestor, whether there were fundamental differences among societies, etc.
28/

A key question for this racist prehistory (remember: racist = explaining racial inequities with claims of racial inferiority/superiority) is which "tribes" or "races" were the most "savage"/"primitive"? 29/

So Galton's story about 2+2 takes on a new meaning and a life of its own as a key piece of evidence for influential prehistorians to define the lowest of the low. "can't add 2+2" and "can't count past 3" become the hallmarks of the most primitive races. 30/

You see Galton's story recycled over and over again in this literature starting in the 1860s, mixed with other (equally dubious) stories about "savages" and "primitives" to illustrate just how inferior the supposedly inferior races could be. 31/

By the end of the 19th century, it is conventional wisdom that "2+2 = 4" represents one of the first intellectual baby steps on the way for civilizations to evolve into proper strapping mathematical empires like Britain, a dividing line between the brutes and the rest. 32/

Also in the late 19th century, some of the same people who used 2+2 to define a specific kind of racial inferiority start to extend the question to non-human animals. 33/

So you get questions of whether birds or dogs can count, e.g., 34/ https://twitter.com/MBarany/status/932977276836294656?s=20

At this point, we've come full circle. One part of Galton's 1850s story used his 2+2 mishap to compare African "savages" to his dog; in the 1880s, John Lubbock is motivated by his Galton-informed prehistory and racial hierarchy to try to teach his dog language/arithmetic 35/

Galton himself, astute readers have already noted, was becoming famous around this time for a new science he called "eugenics" which was all about the inherent racial superiorities/inferiorities he thought you could scientifically measure. 36/

In 2010 I was in the audience at a philosophy conference and a (well-known, widely-respected) speaker was talking about the philosophy of numbers and arithmetic and just whipped out the Galton story like it was no big deal. This stuff is still with us and it's all connected. 37/

So "2+2=4" was specifically used to define racial differences and to explain racial inequity. It was (and in some ways remains) a way of inscribing and naturalizing racial prejudice and discrimination. When I say "2+2" is racist, that's one of the things I mean. 38/38