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

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? Do we need to teach the teachers?

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

How to keep 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..........

Every time I see something about historical landmarks, old buildings, etc., I wonder which slaves built it.

Whenever I come across PBS documentaries or my white friends mentioning their great-great grandmothers and things that were passed down to them, I wonder how slaves factored into their history. We don't have as much stuff to pass down.

When my mom tells me some random story about her childhood (she's 75), I inevitably stop listening and start thinking about how much closer she was to slavery than me.

It's a really weird space to exist in.

I don't know my point. There's something surreal about the experience having to be "taught" when it's already a perpetual part of my psyche.
 
Posted this over in MAP - good article about being a black student in a majority white school district. And the white parents who are either in denial or oblivious to what their children are doing in school
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I don’t remember the first time I realized that I was different from my white classmates. I don’t even remember the first time I understood what race was. But I remember the first time I was made to hate myself for being Black.

I was 10 years old when I was called the N-word for the first time.

We had been dismissed from class for the day, so I went to grab my backpack from my assigned cubby in the corner of my elementary school classroom. Before I could throw it over my shoulders, my classmate had made the announcement.

“Look everyone, it’s Tigger the [N-word].”

I was the only Black girl in the room, so I immediately knew that he was talking about me. If that wasn’t obvious enough, he made sure to clarify by staring and pointing at me while he said it.

The shock from the blow didn’t allow me to fully process what happened. All I could think to do was to question whether I had heard him correctly. When he said it again, he made sure to remove any doubt.

One incident, one word: that’s all it took for me to realize that I was considered the “other”. My innocence and naive childlike hope was gone as I was thrusted into a position of subordination.

•••

My school district in Carmel, Indiana, is home to some of the best public schools in the US – it is where I received my education from the age of five until graduation. Other than the less than 4% of Black students in the district, the schools are made up of white hallways, white teachers and white students…….

Sometimes, I try to convince myself that if my white classmates and teachers were educated on the true history of this country, then maybe my experience wouldn’t have been what it was.

Maybe administrators would see how their choice to dish out a year-long suspension to a Black student for drugs while not punishing the white student (who was caught with more drugs) parallels the “war on drugs” in America.

Maybe they would see that adding extra security near the area dubbed “the Black Spot” mimics profiling and over-policing across the country.

My 16-year sentence in the school system ended in 2016, when I earned my diploma. After the world was forced to grapple with a reckoning on race and policing in 2020, Carmel now claims that they are ready to change, but I can tell nothing has changed.

As I scroll through social media, I look in disgust, but not shock, at the use of “[N-word] this” and “[N-word] that” in comments made.

But instead of tackling this very real racial abuse, teachers, administrators and parents are more afraid of the bogeyman in the corner: critical race theory.

White parents and families across the country are panicked by the idea of students being critical of the United States’ dark history – especially lessons that center the egregious actions of white people over time. The aim of critical race theory is to contextualize the history behind the racism and systemic oppression that we see today.

But the parents of Carmel don’t want their students to be taught about anything that may make their children feel guilty for their whiteness.

The school would rather cater to white comfort than address America’s skeletons.

I never got a say in learning about Black trauma: it was an expectation. At a young age, images of slaves with whip scars on their backs and the horrors of the backlash against the civil rights movement were already burned in my mind.

White students get a say in whether they want to learn about their history. I did not.

Throughout my entire education, I sat silent while teachers sugarcoated white history.

I vividly remember sitting in class while my teacher glorified the actions of white people: how brave they were for freeing the slaves, how kind they were for giving Black people rights, and how trusting they were when letting Japanese people out of internment camps.

Parents are also to blame for their failure to teach their children about racism. Their refusal to educate their children sends the message that they are fine with the way society has been functioning.

Through their willful ignorance, they are breeding a future generation of people who won’t change the dominant culture, because they believe that everything is sunshine and rainbows............

 
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..........Teaching resistance effectively requires focusing on more than a handful of highly visible and extremely dramatic attempts to secure freedom. Accordingly, teachers must push beyond rebellions.

Uprisings make clear that African Americans who engaged in rebellion opposed slavery. But because insurrections were so rare, when they are taught in isolation, students are left with the impression that the vast majority of enslaved people who did not rebel accepted their bondage.

Some even interpret this to mean that African Americans were complicit in their own enslavement.

It is not enough either simply to mention one or two enslaved people who escaped to freedom. This has the same effect as narrowly focusing on rebellion. It leaves students thinking that only those who attempted to flee wanted their freedom.

Instead, teachers must spend an equal if not greater amount of time on the subtler ways that African Americans resisted, drawing students’ attention to the everyday acts of defiance that were far more common than rebellion or flight.

Teachers have to talk about how enslaved people tried to minimize the amount of energy they expended toiling in fields by slowing the pace of work, feigning illness, breaking farming implements, injuring animals and sabotaging crops. And how they took for themselves life’s essentials, from food to clothing, which they consumed, shared, traded and sold.

They have to explain how enslaved artisans honed and learned skills whenever possible, from blacksmithing to dressmaking, to increase their indispensability to those who profited off their labor and to decrease their chances of being sold and separated from loved ones.

They have to discuss how enslaved people attacked their enslavers’ property, burning their homes, barns and storage sheds. These were purposeful acts of economic retaliation intended to strike enslavers where it hurt the most, in their wallets and purses.

And teachers have to highlight the important cultural ways African Americans resisted. Enslaved people formed families whenever possible, marrying, bearing children and keeping those children with them as long as possible.

They also held onto African cultural traditions, such as religious worship practices, which remain visible today among their descendants.

Resistance to slavery demonstrates the harsh reality of the institution and makes clear the essential humanity of enslaved people. But these important lessons about American slavery are lost when we teach resistance too narrowly.

When we focus only on dramatic rebellions or escapes and ignore the more common, mundane acts of resistance such as work slowdowns, we leave students with the false impression that African Americans did not care to be free.

And nothing could be further from the truth.............


 
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From the same article (bolding mine)
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When considering how the history of slavery is taught in kindergarten through 12th grade, most educators emphasize that families remained together and that slavery in the United States was unique for this reason.

History textbooks show images of the slave quarters where men, women and children of all ages sit leisurely outside their cabins.

It is a palatable way to teach this history of such an inhumane institution. However, the reality of slavery from the enslaved perspective paints a much different portrait.

Most enslaved people experienced sales and separations four to five times in their lifetime. This means that they were separated from their families more often than not.

Newspaper accounts reporting on auctions listed the human property for sale in family groupings, but buyers rarely kept families intact. They purchased specific enslaved people to suit their needs and priorities.

As a historian of slavery and scholars of curriculum and instruction who also train K-12 teachers at the University of Texas at Austin, we are developing curriculum to help share this history in a way that reflects the experiences of the enslaved.

How do we account for a 3-day-old infant in the market for sale without the parents?

What does it mean that we find hundreds of children younger than 10 up for sale? These were the realities of slavery and represent the history that we are helping teachers share with their students.

The selling off of husbands, wives and children was a central part of the system, and enslaved people lived in constant fear as a result. The enslaved families sold in Savannah referred to the auction as “the Weeping Time” because so many tears were shed over the two-day auction.

Scholars who write about it have provided a context to this large sale, and educators can use it to teach their students about the complexities of U.S. slavery.........
 
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I'd say you haven't spent much time on Tigerdroppings. The EE isn't even close the the level of horrible that is Tigerdroppings.
It's a warzone over there. Actually, it would be a good lesson in understanding the hate and vitriol that most are shocked to find exist in people. Also shines a bright light on many issues this thread is seeking to fix.
 
It's a warzone over there. Actually, it would be a good lesson in understanding the hate and vitriol that most feel shocked to find exist in people. Also shines a bright light on many issues this thread is seeking to fix.
The last time I was on TD, I spent maybe 15 minutes on there before I closed the page and never visited again. It was a racist cesspool then, and I have to imagine it probably still is now. There's simply no comparing them to SR. We don't allow racist posting here. TD mods didn't seem to care back then.
 
It's a warzone over there. Actually, it would be a good lesson in understanding the hate and vitriol that most are shocked to find exist in people. Also shines a bright light on many issues this thread is seeking to fix.

Yep. It's totally uncontrolled stupidity, racism and hatred over there. And, I think it's not only tolerated by their moderators, but also encouraged. That place makes me embarrassed to be an LSU fan sometimes. And then I remember that 90% of their posters probably never set foot on LSU's campus other than to go to a sporting event.
 
Woof, it really is a warzone over there.

Some gems:



I retract my prior statement and amend it to the following:

Tigerdroppings is 4chan lite..
 
another question about teaching about slavery and racism- when to start?
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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........

Others can maybe speak to this more personally, but I think we should cut way back on the slavery stuff - or struggle narratives in general
I think they perversely reinforce a lot of 2nd class citizen stuff among some ‘privileged’ students
Many more stories about ‘regular folk’ who were doing just fine when the system wasn’t stacked against them (and there are TONS of those stories

Like I said the focus of Jim Crow and on slavery need to flip
BUT not viewing Jim Crow from the victim’s pov but from the perpetrators- the bad people doing bad things

I’ve argued before that our culture fetishizes punishment - we see someone getting punished and (subconsciously- being charitable) we assume they deserve it
Turn the lens of the perpetrators of racism/violence more so than the victims
 

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