"Because of white racism's ability to bludgeon us into believing that we are inferior beings and therefore incapable of learning math and the sciences, we must spend a significant amount of our learning and teaching time unlearning and unteaching. This is to say, for example, that when a brother or sister reaches the freshman college level, he or she has already been subjected to at least 17 years of conditioning that dictates: "You are too black and too ignorant to understand such lily-white and intelligent things as math, chemistry, physics, etc." Thus, a major part of the teacher's initial instructional time must be spent dealing with the psychological block against learning math—or any of the sciences."