Fail to Reject

by Lawrence Mark Lesser

He asks, “How can you mix social justice with teaching statistics?”
I’m thinking: how can you not?
How better to illuminate
deviation from expected values?

He says, “But it’s not neutral.”
Like it’s natural and neutral to teach from books
based on baseball, playing cards, and flatscreen TVs
rather than view by neighborhood things like

incidence of asthma or
incidents of racial profiling.
We’ve been testing
a null that dulls 

by what’s normalized
as if the type 
1 error
is always worse.

When he says social justice is beyond our scope,
I want to ask: do you mean
our discipline or
our humanity?