"The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics"

Is this the dumbest thing I have ever read? It definitely is a contender: “Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism: The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics.” The link goes to an abstract of an article that was published by the University of Chicago–God help us!–by one Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and Department of Women’s and Gender Studies University of New Hampshire. You think that is a weird combination? Well, it is a weird paper. I studied physics many years ago, and as I recall there are laws of physics that have been empirically tested and verified. How could race possibly have anything to do with it? Silly me:

"In this article, I propose that race and ethnicity impact epistemic outcomes in physics, despite the universality of the laws that undergird physics, and I introduce the concept of white empiricism to provide one explanation for why. White empiricism is the phenomenon through which only white people (particularly white men) are read has having a fundamental capacity for objectivity and Black people (particularly Black women) are produced as an ontological other."

Which somehow impacts their ability to solve physics problems, evidently.

"White empiricism comes to dominate empirical discourse in physics because whiteness powerfully shapes the predominant arbiters of who is a valid observer of physical and social phenomena. Based primarily on their own experiences, white men, who are the dominant demographic in physics, construct the figure of the observer to exclude anyone who does not share the attending social and intellectual identities and beliefs."