Of course. How can you understand physics if you don’t understand white privilege? Right?

Katherine Timpf of National Review reports.

New High-School Physics Curriculum Includes Lessons on White Privilege

A high-school physics teacher has developed his own six-day curriculum that he uses to teach about institutional racism, privilege, and social justice as part of his seniors’ physics classes.

The teacher, Moses Rifkin of University Prep in Seattle, has also been promoting the lesson plan to other high-school science instructors.

John Burk, a math and physics teacher from Delaware, said that he learned about the curriculum when he met Rifkin at a People of Color Conference and gushed that it “brilliantly brings lessons about social justice, privilege, and institutional racism into the physics classroom.”

In fact, Burk loved the unit so much that he had Rifkin write a guest post about it in his (Burk’s) own blog, in which Rifkin explained:

“I was jealous of my colleagues in English and History who got to talk every day in class about society and how it worked and how to be moral and caring and kind, whereas those conversations with students only happened for me outside the classroom.”

“That I was teaching at a private school only made matters worse: my students weren’t learning about their own privilege (academic and, in most cases, economic and racial),” Rifkin continued.

During one section of the course, Rifkin’s post explains, students study black physicists. For a homework assignment, he instructs students to learn about a pre-1950s black physicist and also a modern black physicist.