If you want Arab people to be able to appreciate the information, translate the page into Arabic or one of its various “dialects”. That would be useful.
Uh, nobody thinks this. I'm sensing an straw man argument fast incoming..
> So it seems unreasonable to stretch the truth to diversify or narrow down the number of people you mention
It's entirely unclear where you see the truth being stretched? Factually recognizing important contributions by people from under-represented backgrounds is doing the exact opposite of narrowing the "number of people you mention". It's literally mentioning more people who contributed to a certain effort or field of study.
Of course they do. That's what they say:
> The way I understand the program of decolonizing mathematics is to follow two principles:
> first, to recognize the contributions of people with diverse backgrounds, in order to offer more protagonists who can inspire and with whom more people can identify > second, to provide examples and motivations that are relatable to under-represented backgrounds and identities, in order to reach and be more immediately helpful to more people
They imply that people will more readily identify and congregate with people of their own racial and ethnic background. That may be true, that doesn't make it any less racist.
> It's entirely unclear where you see the truth being stretched? Factually recognizing important contributions by people from under-represented backgrounds is doing the exact opposite of narrowing the "number of people you mention".
If you factually recognize important contributions, you don't have to make any efforts or care about the raised issue.
> It's literally mentioning more people who contributed to a certain effort or field of study.
Mentioning more than what?
This article to me just tries to raise awareness for the fact that our western history of who invented what is often incomplete and sometimes simply wrong.
Historians right now have the unenviable task of considering how the history they work with has been distorted by racism (e.g. by playing down the role of certain people with the "wrong" race and instead attributing things to people with the "right" race).
I'd like an encyclopedia to list all inventors of something even if they are not known in my culture — preferably in my own language as well, but that is a different topic.
I'm at a loss of words for what I feel towards respecting (even promoting!) the idea that a piece of knowledge ought to become interesting or valuable if there is ethnic relationship to it. It reeks of supremacist talk to me.
If someone came up to me saying that he got into mathematics because Charles Babbage was a white guy, just like him, I'd think that person doesn't belong in current society. This doesn't change if the person belongs to any minority.