The problem of White Supremacy - Spinoff from Buffalo Shooting thread (1 Viewer)

I don’t think we will see anyone happy about racism in our lifetimes. I think we will see progress for sure, but never to a point where we as a society say “we are there.” I have seen progress in my lifetime. I grew up in New Orleans and moved to a small town as a teenager. I saw the difference right away. I wasn’t allowed to invite friends to salary with us for a few days because I was told it wouldn’t go well. The high school I went through had to drive through my town for away football games and the black fella’s would lower their heads below the windows. A friend was kicked out of their home by their parents at 16 for dating a black person. And it is not just the south. I live in Wisconsin and see racism here. For me personally though I have seen change. Is it fast enough, of course not.

We made a lot of progress, but over the last 6 years we have done some serious backsliding. The greatest indicator is my kids high school experiences. I have 26, 24, 18, and 16-year-olds. The last 2 are experiencing things the first 2 didn't have to go through because we have seen the clock set back about 30 years on race relations over the last 6 years.
 
Education of racism needs to be a priority. Too many people, including teachers simply don't believe it exists

I've said this before:

There was slavery, slavery was bad, Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, then there was racism, racism was bad, then Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks ended racism.

The End.

For decades that was basically pretty much all that was taught, with a little Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglas and George Carver Washington added each February

An exponentially better job needs to be done
I was in high school when I learned about things like slave trade, the Underground Railroad, Jim Crow, red-lining, segregation and the like. I don't ever remember being taught MLK & Rosa Parks ended racism. I don't disagree that we still can do a better job in educating people about minority history and treatment in our schools, but it doesn't help us either to pretend that the education we did have was so much less than it was. One thing that I would like to see in high schools is an actual course just on minority & native history, but I also agree that our other history & sociology classes could do well with more integration.
 
I don’t think we will see anyone happy about racism in our lifetimes. I think we will see progress for sure, but never to a point where we as a society say “we are there.” I have seen progress in my lifetime. I grew up in New Orleans and moved to a small town as a teenager. I saw the difference right away. I wasn’t allowed to invite friends to salary with us for a few days because I was told it wouldn’t go well. The high school I went through had to drive through my town for away football games and the black fella’s would lower their heads below the windows. A friend was kicked out of their home by their parents at 16 for dating a black person. And it is not just the south. I live in Wisconsin and see racism here. For me personally though I have seen change. Is it fast enough, of course not.
Sadly, I have no hope for it ever really going away. Our differences have both been a blessing as well as a source of hate and division for as long as recorded history and I think that it always will be. I try not to be cynical on a lot of things, but this is one that I can't see a path through. I fear there will always be people who simply cannot put aside their differences as well as those who will take advantage of those differences.
 
I was in high school when I learned about things like slave trade, the Underground Railroad, Jim Crow, red-lining, segregation and the like. I don't ever remember being taught MLK & Rosa Parks ended racism.

It was taught by the omission of teaching more recent history showing that things like systemic racism, implicit bias, de facto segregated schools, and the effects of slavery and Jim Crow continue to this day. Which is why we do need to cover those things in classes even now. I don't disagree that specific classes on minority history should be taught, but given the limits of school curriculum's it should also be taught in American history, state history, and Civics classes. It's all of our history, and present, not just the history of specific minority groups.
 
I have seen the children of racists go diffeent directions. Thats why when someone blames parents for a childs racism, that not always correct.
I know many people who's parents are as racists as they come, but the child grew into an adult and made adult decisions about not be a racists. But i also know many who are just as racists as their parents. So blaming the parent is mostly a cop out.
My cousin who is married to a black man, went back to school in her late 30's. a class mate (in her 20s) and her decided to have study session at the younger ones house. My cousin brought her daughter with her (who s mixed). My cousin got a text as she was taking stuff out of her bag, before she could read it, the girl came running in there saying "i'm sorry, i meant to send that text to my fiance!", The text said "I didn't know Sarah was a N lover" but used the whole word. The first thing the girl said was, I'm sorry.. I am not racists, thats just the way i was raised... My cousin told her you are a grown woman with a house and a fiance, you are old enough to make your own life decisions. She packed her stuff and left and never spoke to her again.
A good friend of mine, his parents are pretty racists, they are the type who are aganst interraccal marriage, etc. He says his sister is the same way. But he isn't anything like them. He has had many blow ups with them about how they talk around his children. He has left abruptly from their house quite a few times over it, and they still don't understand why he gets so mad, :its just their opinions".
My wife's uncle was a good guy, would give anyone the shirt off his back if they needed it, black or white. But was one of the most racists people i knew. I had to call him out once because he made a comment about Puerto Ricans, which is my heritage on my moms side. But he knew not to make many racists comments in my company, but usually said them "jokingly".. His oldest son is a sherriff deputy, who is just like him. His other son is a teacher who is nothing like him.
 
I think that's true, maybe my education was unique but I learned about Jim-Crow, MLK, and the Civil Rights movement. But, what I did not learn about is what has and hasn't happened since then. There is certainly a pervasive thought in educated middle to upper class white America that the Civil Rights movement more or less ended racism. I didn't even know until law school that the State of Louisiana is still under a Federal Desegregation Order right up until this day. People really think all that ended with Brown v. Board of Education. And white people certainly were never taught the long term effects of slavery, centuries of racism, segregated schools, or the current inherent bias and systemic racism.
Given that MLK was killed in 1968 and I was in high school in the late 80's, I don't think there was a lot of ANY other history taught that occurred much beyond the 70's.
 
Given that MLK was killed in 1968 and I was in high school in the late 80's, I don't think there was a lot of ANY other history taught that occurred much beyond the 70's.

Yep, I was in high school at the same time and, yes, not a lot of history was taught past that time period, but those 20 or so years of history should have been taught and some more recent history was taught in my Civics class. Although it mostly focused on the elected officials and politicians of the day.

There wasn't really any discussion of the current state of the Cold War or the reforms that Gorbachev was making to effectively end the Cold War. Nor was there much of anything taught about what was going on in the Middle East. But, all of those things, including the effects of racism and slavery still happening, should have been taught and still should be taught.

It was odd that American history classes seemed to spend a lot more time talking about what happened hundreds of years ago as opposed to what had gone on in the last 30 or 40 years. The same was true of World History classes.
 
I feel like the root of the issue lies somewhere between people wanting to be seen as special or better-than AND people not being able to accept that others differ from them.

I haven't done enough reading about it, but at a glance, the human ego is the single-most repulsive thing about us.

I have a 'solution' but I've already harped too much on it over the last few days. And it's not realistic.

I guess my question(s) would be how do you eradicate or shrink an ego?

How do you convince someone that just because they don't have melanin doesn't mean they're better than someone who does?

How do you convince someone that just because they have more money doesn't mean they have more intelligence than those who don't?

That just because you vote a certain way doesn't make you right. Why do you need to feel right anyway. Why do you care that not everyone looks or thinks like you. What's driving that need. Who the hell are you that we all need to be molded in your image?

It's stuff like that - the desire to feel and appear elevated that lends itself to keeping others down.
 
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You know one of the things I personally do is try and find commonality. To me food has always been something I could talk about with anyone. I have built bonds with people this way. It’s simple but we all eat. We like to talk about why our food is best. I mean I have Mexican and Italian friends who say there’s is best but yeah we know that’s not true lol.
 
Teaching about racism is so much more than just deciding to do it. How exactly should it be done? We certainly have a lot of examples of how NOT to do it


As I said, a lot of teachers don't believe in racism, systematic or otherwise so how can they be expected to teach it? How do we teach the teachers?

Well meaning teachers may be completely unprepared for how to teach it?

How to keep classroom discussions from going south in a hurry?

How should it be taught in classes with 1 or 2 black students?

I've posted these articles here before
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For generations, children have been spared the whole, terrible reality about slavery’s place in U.S. history, but some schools are beginning to strip away the deception and evasions.

Pacing his classroom in north-central Iowa, Tom McClimon prepared to deliver an essential truth about American history to his eighth-grade students. He stopped and slowly raised his index finger in front of his chest.

“Think about this. For 246 years, slavery was legal in America. It wasn’t made illegal until 154 years ago,” the 26-year-old teacher told the 23 students sitting before him at Fort Dodge Middle School.

“So, what does that mean? It means slavery has been a part of America much longer than it hasn’t been a part of America.”........

But telling the truth about slavery in American public schools has long been a failing proposition. Many teachers feel ill-prepared, and textbooks rarely do more than skim the surface.

There is too much pain to explore. Too much guilt, ignorance, denial.

It is why, just four years ago, textbooks told students “workers” were brought from Africa to America, not men, women and children in chains.

It is why, last year, a teacher asked students to list “positive” aspects of slavery. It is why, even in 2019, there are teachers in schools who still think holding mock auctions is a good way for students to learn about slavery.

Misinformation and flawed teaching about America’s “original sin” fills our classrooms from an early age.

And yet as issues of race and prejudice and privilege continue to roil America, an understanding of how slavery forged the country seems all the more necessary.....

A range of critics — historians, educators, civil rights activists — want to change how schools teach the subject. The evidence of slavery’s legacy is all around us, they say, pointing to the persistence of segregation in schools, the gaping racial disparities in income and wealth, and the damage done to black families by the U.S. criminal justice system.

According to a 2018 report to the United Nations by the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization that advocates reducing racial disparities in prison sentences, American judges will send one in three black boys born in 2001 to prison in their lifetimes, compared with one in 17 white boys born the same year.

The failure to educate students about slavery prevents a full and honest reckoning with its ongoing cost in America. Teaching the truth about slavery, critics argue, could help remedy that. But that means acknowledging and exploring slavery’s depravity.

It means telling the personal stories of enslaved people, the physical and psychological cruelty they endured, the sexual violence inflicted upon them, the separation of husbands and wives, parents and children.

The difficult truth means explaining to students not just how this practice of institutionalized evil came to be but also how it was accepted, embraced and inculcated in American daily life since enslaved Africans were brought to Jamestown, Va., 400 years ago.

Slavery was not accepted by everyone, of course, but by enough that it was protected by laws, reinforced by practice and justified or excused in all corners of the country.

For the 50 million students attending public school in America, how they are taught about America’s history of slavery and its deprivations is as fundamental as how they are taught about the Declaration of Independence and its core assertion that “all men are created equal.”

A deep understanding of one without a deep understanding of the other is to not know America at all..........

 
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I feel like the root of the issue lies somewhere between people wanting to be seen as special or better-than AND people not being able to accept that others differ from them.

I haven't done enough reading about it, but at a glance, the human ego is the single-most repulsive thing about us.

I have a 'solution' but I've already harped too much on it over the last few days. And it's not realistic.

I guess my question(s) would be how do you eradicate or shrink an ego?

How do you convince someone that just because they don't have melanin doesn't mean they're better than someone who does?

How do you convince someone that just because they have more money doesn't mean they have more intelligence than those who don't?

That just because you vote a certain way doesn't make you right. Why do you need to feel right anyway. Why do you care that not everyone looks or thinks like you. What's driving that need. Who the hell are you that we all need to be molded in your image?

It's stuff like that - the desire to feel and appear elevated that lends itself to keeping others down.
Absolutely 100%, I agree that the ego is a powerful ” demon” and I Frame it this way because I feel that your ego will get you into more hot water than any other one of your human tendencies, I agree that parenting is not necessarily the main reason for having younger racist out here because there are people that have learned to not be like their parents.It doesn’t help that we have so-called media outlets that will perpetuate the negative stereotype of people of color and refuse to admit what the actual problem is.
 
You know one of the things I personally do is try and find commonality. To me food has always been something I could talk about with anyone. I have built bonds with people this way. It’s simple but we all eat. We like to talk about why our food is best. I mean I have Mexican and Italian friends who say there’s is best but yeah we know that’s not true lol.
Foodfight!!
 
In his eighth-grade American history class at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Germantown, Md., Philip Jackson tells a story about going on long family road trips to southern Virginia and North Carolina when he was a child in the late 1970s and early ’80s.

When they would stop to pick up his grandmother, he tells the students, she would bring a basket of food, toilet paper and a large container of iced tea.

It wasn’t until Jackson was older that he learned his grandmother’s habit grew from traveling during periods of enforced segregation that prohibited blacks from stopping at certain restaurants or using restrooms available to white patrons.

A granddaughter of a woman who had been born into slavery, she grew up in the Jim Crow South, where such discrimination was common. Bringing supplies with her, even long after Civil Rights laws were passed, was a practice she never shook.

“She carried her history with her,” Jackson tells the class, referencing a James Baldwin quote. “We are our history.”

The lesson the 46-year-old teacher wants to impart is that while slavery in America can feel distant, we are only a few generations removed from it. And he wants students in his ethnically and racially mixed classroom to make the connections to that history. He wants it to be relevant to their lives.

Social studies and history teachers throughout the country face unique challenges when it comes to educating students about America’s slavery past. Many worry about whether their students can handle the raw details of abuse and predation that slavery entailed.

Some feel ill-equipped or that they lack the training to teach the subject. Some are concerned that delving into that history will stir up anger, hurt, shame, guilt.

And for many, there just isn’t enough time to address slavery as deeply and carefully as they would like.

Over the course of the year, Jackson’s students will spend eight to 10 class sessions discussing slavery and how it affected American history. It’s a lot more than Jackson learned about slavery as a student in the same county in the Washington suburbs three decades earlier. But it can still feel like not enough...........

Sometimes, when emotions run high, maintaining a safe space can be challenging. Keanya Clifton-Roach, who is black, found that out in the fall of 2016 when teaching a government class in a majority white public high school in southern Maryland.

For one class project, she asked students to read articles about the Confederate flag and analyze whether it represented heritage or hate.

Clifton-Roach, 42, envisioned it as an academic exercise for the students, but reactions quickly boiled over. Black students in the class told her they could lose friends if they wrote what they really felt. Other students came to her in tears about the project.

“It really touched on some nerves, especially with the white parents and the white community in that area,” Clifton-Roach said. “A lot of these kids could not handle it. It got to the point where parents told my principal their children would not do the assignment.”

Mark Hoey, who is 53 and white, has taught American history in Philadelphia’s public schools since 1993. He, too, said he wasn’t prepared at first for the strong feelings that coursed through his students when they studied slavery and related material.

“It really affected those kids. It’s really raw, and it’s not just because somebody’s rehashing [the history] and making them angry,” Hoey said. “I had my master’s in history, so I got the academics of it, but not the emotional impact. And it’s really strong.”

Despite trepidations and concerns they may harbor about teaching the difficult history of slavery, the educators interviewed for this report shared a belief of how essential it is for all students — for all Americans — to have a deep understanding of the role slavery played in shaping the country at every stage of its existence and how its legacy is still with us in ways large and small............

 
Also an issue. There should be national standards
=================================

When the Texas State Board of Education met in 2010, 145 years after the Civil War ended, it decided to set new social studies standards for teaching about America’s deadliest conflict. One contentious issue before them: How central was slavery to causing the war? As the board saw it, not very.

Slavery, one board member said at the time, was “a side issue to the Civil War.” And so the board decided on new standards. The state’s roughly 5 million students would be taught that the cause of the war was “sectionalism, states’ rights and slavery.”

The decision to marginalize the role of slavery by listing it third was attacked by many, including historians and social studies teachers. They pointed to overwhelming evidence that the South seceded precisely because it worried that Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 would mean a push to end slavery.

Last year, after much wrangling, the board amended its standard to put slavery at the forefront.

But the fight over the language in education standards points to a bigger issue regarding the teaching of slavery in U.S. history. Every state — and almost every school district — does it differently. Unlike with math and science, there is no nationally agreed upon set of standards for teaching social studies.

What public school children in the United States learn about slavery has almost everything to do with where they grow up.

In their official standards for teaching social studies and history, some states explicitly call for teaching about aspects of slavery throughout a student’s K-12 education, while others refer to it in passing or not at all.

Massachusetts mentions slavery 104 times in its history and social studies framework. Louisiana’s standards for K-12 social studies refer to slavery four times. Idaho’s guidelines mention slavery twice.

Few states mention the enslavement of Native Americans in their standards despite growing scholarship that points to it being widespread in early colonial America and continuing throughout much of the 19th century, particularly in Western states and territories........

 
another question about teaching about slavery and racism- when to start?
=======================================

Taylor Harris was immediately concerned when the notice came home about the first-grade field trip. The outing would take her daughter and classmates from their Loudoun County, Va., elementary school to visit what had been a vast Virginia plantation, where hundreds of people had been enslaved. The name of the former plantation had been changed to “historic house and gardens,” but Harris, who is African American, had a lot of questions.

What would the children learn about the plantation’s history? How would the lives of enslaved people who lived there be presented? And why was a group of first-graders going there in the first place when there were so many other options for educational field trips?

“Will we see slaves there?” her then 7-year-old asked in spring 2017. In an essay she wrote for The Washington Post, Harris recalled replying, “I had to tell her no, but then, yes, you would have been a slave.”

Parents and teachers throughout the country grapple with when to start teaching young children of all races about the United States’ slavery past and how best to do that.

Some believe that the history of slavery is too hard for young children to understand and that it is better to wait until later in elementary school or middle school to introduce the subject.

Some say the best approach is to start early, introducing children as young as 5 by using picture books about slavery that are not graphic but also don’t play down the experience. Some want to avoid the subject altogether.

Harris volunteered to be a chaperone on the field trip. If her child was going to visit a former plantation, she wanted to make sure her daughter wouldn’t be served a whitewashed version of history that ignored the racism, cruelty and economic exploitation that made life so profitable and enjoyable for one group of people and miserable for another.

The results were mixed.

“I felt resentment that this story was still being told as a white, wealthy entree, with black people and slavery as a side dish,” Harris said in a recent interview about the visit.
“Then, I felt some pride as my daughter seemed to hold her own among her peers. But I shouldn’t have to choose between or hold both of these emotions,” she said.
Finding books and lessons that deal with slavery honestly and appropriately can be difficult. In just the past five years, two books aimed at young children have prompted a wide backlash because of how they portray enslaved people in the early United States.

“A Birthday Cake for George Washington,” a 2016 picture book, was recalled by the publisher weeks after its release because of widespread objections to the depiction of enslaved people happily preparing for their owner’s birthday in colonial Philadelphia.

At one point, the narrator, a young girl, says, “Me and Papa and all our family are among the slaves who belong to President Washington. Next to the president’s personal servant, Billy Lee, Papa is the slave President and Mrs. Washington trust the most.”..............

One difficulty for teachers is a fear that the reality of slavery will be overwhelming for young students. Instead, many educators choose to teach triumphant stories about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad or Frederick Douglass that celebrate enslaved people escaping to freedom.

But many young students don’t yet fully comprehend what slavery entailed or why the runaways need to flee. So they are introduced to tales of heroic escapes from slavery without really knowing what it was.

In guidelines it issued recently for teaching young children about slavery, Teaching Tolerance, a nonprofit project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, argues: “Slavery is a fundamental part of United States history. Just as history instruction begins in elementary school, so too should learning about slavery.
“Sugarcoating or ignoring slavery until later grades makes students more upset by or even resistant to true stories about American history,” the guidelines say........

 

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