Mathematician Piper Harron deals with harassment after standing up for diversity in math.

Piper Harron received her PhD in mathematics from Princeton University in January 2016. More interestingly, she started in 2003, left in 2009, lectured at Northeastern for three semesters, then stopped working and had two children born in 2011 and 2014. Her PhD thesis received recognition for its humorous style and blunt social commentary (Spoiler: math culture is oppressive), and she has traveled to many institutions around the country and in Canada to talk about her experiences trying to survive other people's good intentions. She is currently a postdoc in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

This story originally aired on Mar. 9th, 2018, in an episode titled “In Honor of Pi Day”.

Story Transcript

I smile a lot.  I was invited to do this radio show once -- it never aired.  I'd been invited because they had heard about me, about my thesis.  At one point, one of the hosts expressed surprise at my voice.  He thought I'd be angrier.  Well, my cisgender, heterosexual darling, this is what angry sounds like. 

I smile a lot because navigating social expectations and other people’s perceptions is second nature to me.  The analysis, the accommodation happens automatically without my consent.  It’s not a quality I recommend in general, but it is a necessary survival skill for many of us. 

All of my invitations are because of my thesis, the first time I stopped accommodating expectations. 

So my PhD thesis was weird.  It’s pure math, but I included introductions for non-mathematicians and even the mathy parts were far less formal than you might expect.  I filled it with humor and complaints.  My prologue talked about sexism inherent in math culture and throughout I was honest about my understanding, my confusion, and my frustration. 

I wrote my thesis for me, and research math is basically never for me. 

After it was accepted, I put it online on a website I called The Liberated Mathematician and the next day a friend told me I broke math Twitter.  So it was kind of a big-ish deal at the time and I get invited to things.  I even have this talk I wrote in which I describe my journey, my journey from someone who smiles and accommodates to someone who does what she wants -- and still smiles. 

And I thought I would tell that story here.  It fits, but I can’t.  Sorry. 

The thing is, my talk is not about my turning point.  It’s about the underlying pain that accompanies oppression.  And my story is only meant to empower those who, like me, have struggled to understand how do we survive?  How do we thrive?  I have no intention of presenting racist violence as a catalyst for a moment of self-realization where I become the hero who did the thing and we all feel good about ourselves.  No.  That is not my story.  That did not happen and I won’t say that it did. 

I was invited to tell a story, but I am not a storyteller.  Stories are nice, engaging.  They bring you in.  They allow you to empathize with another life.  They can also be packaged and marketed.  They can be abused.  They allow you to distance yourself from the burdens of reality. 

Now, you're all invited to my real talk.  (I mean, you'd have to invite me to give it.)  And I would tell you some things, some funny, some not and you would get to know me better. 

There is no ten-minute version.  I need people of color, trans people, native people, disabled people, I need them to know that I hear them.  Our stories are endless.  Our struggles are ongoing.  Our pain is not for your consumption and spiritual growth.  When we overcome adversity, our oppressors are so moved that they do nothing to fix the adversity that we never should have faced in the first place.  I will not be knowingly complicit in an event that allows my oppressors to feign empathy while they keep their distance, while you continue to do nothing.  No.  You do not get my thesis story. 

What I will give you instead is the epilogue.  See, after decades of empathizing with and internally apologizing for all that totally-not-racist white people I was surrounded by, it finally hit me.  That this country would see me murdered, leave my body laying on the ground, blame me for my own death and charge my parents for the ambulance.  That was my turning point.  That’s how I was able to write my thesis as if nothing mattered. 

Are you feeling empowered and inspired yet?  Look them up and see how this country sees me: Natasha McKenna, Korryn Gaines, Brooklyn BreYanna Stevenson, Kisha Michael, Marquintan Sandlin, Tamir Rice, to name a few. 

With my thesis, I became The Liberated Mathematician and I gained an audience and I gained a platform and then, this summer, I told white men that they were in my way.  I said this on a math website which had, I presumed, a limited audience.  What I didn’t know was that the alt-right has people searching the internet for academics like me egregiously sticking up for the human rights of marginalized people, and they literally want me personally to not exist.  I know because they told me. 

They told me every day.  They told me every few hours.  People read the alt-right headlines and the context-free quotes and got their feelings hurt.  They got angry and they said this is not their America.  They wrote me emails and they sent me messages on Facebook. 

And these guardians of America called me racial slurs, sexist slurs, homophobic and transphobic slurs.  They called me ugly.  They said they hoped I got cancer and died.  They said I should be fired, I should lose my children.  They said I better hope I don’t run into them in real life.  These people were going to make America great again by sending me pictures of lynched black men hanging from trees.  I guess that was the last time America was great. 

Have you ever waited impatiently for something you're excited for?  Do you know how long that takes?  Have you ever waited for an end to something awful?  Do you know how long that takes? 

Have you ever waited for the pain to stop?  It seems silly to measure this in weeks.  What’s two or three weeks?  I want you to think of this in terms of hours.  It was over 300 hours that I endured this barrage of hate.  And it wasn’t even the hate that got to me so much as it was the uncertainty.  For over 300 hours, I felt unsafe.  Can you think of a time when you didn’t feel safe?  When you didn’t know what was going to happen to you?  Whether or how it was going to end?  Whether your life would be ruined forever or…? 

As soon as it started, a friend warned me that this was an attack.  They would threaten me, threaten my family, try to get me actually fired.  And, in fact, they emailed every single member of the math faculty, the Board of Regents, the Chair, and left threatening voicemails I have not listened to.  One student contacted every single journalist, editor and photographer in the state. 

By day three of this, my outlook was dark.  I received a lot of support from friends and strangers but it did not break the darkness.  The constant exposure to hate has an effect even if you don’t believe it, even if you don’t care, even if these people are truly nothing to you.  That’s something I never understood about bullying.  It has a power even if you understand it’s not real. 

Now, I was told this was my fault.  I’m not talking trolls anymore.  I’m talking about people in my world or in my periphery, people who claimed that they were trying to help.  I was told I should have expected this.  I was told my blog post was imperfect and that’s why the harassment was lasting so long.  I was told I shouldn’t even be writing these things on the internet if I haven't put in the time and the research, if I haven't been following the social justice issues coming out of other departments.  I was told I was responding wrong.  I was told I wasn’t listening. 

The trolls made me unsafe because they wanted me to shut up, to not exist.  They wanted me fired.  They actually tried to destroy me in as much as they could. 

The so-called allies made me unsafe because they told me that who I was was not enough.  That my story, my pain did not matter if I didn’t do things in the way they deemed fit.  They told me it was not okay to have an emotional reaction even as I’m scanning every damned email looking for physical threat against me and my children. 

The so-called allies scrutinized me.  They scrutinized my behavior, my emotions, my reactions.  They took the trolls for granted.  What did I expect?  The trolls and the false allies shared a common belief that I was some kind of soldier in a cause rather than a human being.  And this would be funny but it’s not because soldiers are human beings too.  Soldiers get stress and trauma disorders and so did I. 

Six weeks before school started, I had my first panic attack.  It had been about a month since the harassment had died down and I thought that my life and my sense of self were returning to normal and I finally made my first public post on Facebook.  The very next day, I get an email from an alt-right website saying they're running a story on my Facebook activity.  They have screenshots.  They have comments from my spouse and my friends. 

I walked away from the computer and the walls started closing in.  “I can’t do this, I can’t do this, I can’t do this, I can’t live like this.  I’m gonna have to give it all up.  I came this far and I’m gonna have to give it all up.” 

Being The Liberated Mathematician, talking about things I care about is important to me but I could not stand up to the fear of another psychological assault. 

For the next two-and-a-half months, I would have basically constant anxiety and one to two full panic attacks a week.  The constant anxiety was like dread took over my body, physical sensations in my stomach, up through my chest, my throat and in my mouth. 

I have anxiety still and anxiety makes everything harder.  Anxiety is your body treats everyday tasks like scary, scary monsters.  I look at my to-do list and I go, “No.  Absolutely not.  Everything is impossible.  I cannot.” 

It’s not like I've never not accomplished things before.  The difference with anxiety is the impact.  So previously, I might not have done everything as efficiently or as early as I wanted but things get more or less done.  With anxiety it’s like I’m about to lose several thousand dollars because I can't figure out how to do the reimbursements because it just takes too many steps. 

With anxiety it’s like I flew across an ocean and all the way across the country to go to a conference and I’m about to miss it because I can't figure out what time it starts, where it is or how to get there. 

With anxiety, it’s like I’m not going to eat because there are too many decisions, not enough space and it’s safer in bed anyway. 

This is not the story you wanted to hear.  I did not tell you about my approach to research.  I went over time.  But this is life.  This is what we’re up against. 

I appreciate the smiles, the thank yous, the opportunities, the free flights.  I really do.  But what I need is for you to work harder to make the world safe so that my friends of color, my trans friends, my disabled friends, so that we can focus on our work instead of fighting to exist. 

And if this seemed like a bad story, good.  Do something.