Making Light of Slavery?

 

Recently in the Texas History class I am teaching a student shared an example of how two friends would quasi reenact an enslaved, enslaver situation at the place where they work. The White person would tell the Black person “get to work” and so on.
This student followed up in an email asking my thoughts: “How do you feel about that though, specifically, making a joke out of slavery? Do you think it’s offensive, ignores the plight of the enslaved, or perhaps something I/we haven’t considered? Or is it okay, diminishing the detrimental effects on the psyche of the African Americans by satirizing it?”
I asked if I could have time to think about it and “reply” here. This student said yes, so here goes.

 

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Source: andrewpegoda.com

Detroit Student Suspended For Rest Of The Year Over Pocketknife Found In Purse

 

“Atiya, an Advanced Placement student, was originally expelled from Annapolis High following the incident. However, on Monday, the school board rolled back her punishment, albeit slightly. Atiya is now suspended for the rest of the year, but will be allowed to take online classes and graduate with her class in 2015, reports local outlet WJBK-TV.”

 

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Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

An Introduction to Settler Colonialism at UBC

 

This three-part series on settler colonialism is co-authored between two people: one who identifies as a michif (Métis) man from Saskatoon, the other who identifies as a racialized, non-Indigenous female settler. As co-authors, we are speaking from our own perspectives as an Indigenous person (Justin) and as a settler (Kay).

 

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Source: unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com

German universities scrap all tuition fees

 

“All German universities will be free of charge when term starts next week after fees were abandoned in Lower Saxony, the last of seven states to charge.

“Tuition fees are socially unjust,” said Dorothee Stapelfeldt, senator for science in Hamburg, which scrapped charges in 2012. “They particularly discourage young people who do not have a traditional academic family background from taking up studies. It is a core task of politics to ensure that young women and men can study with a high quality standard free of charge in Germany.”

 

Source: www.thetimes.co.uk

 

Not having access to equal education is a form of oppression.

 

Teaching ‘The New Jim Crow’

 

Teaching Tolerance has teamed up with Michelle Alexander—author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness—to offer educators two FREE webinars exploring mass incarceration in the United States and how to teach about it. Don’t miss out on these unique opportunities to hear Alexander speak about how mass incarceration represents a form of racialized social control, one that traps millions of people of color in a permanent undercaste and parallels an earlier system of racial control—Jim Crow.

 

– Click through to hear her lesson –

Source: www.tolerance.org

Notes towards a Chicano history of the US

 

Schools in the US teach a White or Anglo American history of the country. Because of White guilt it is full of lies, half-truths and stuff left out. There is much to learn and unlearn:

 

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Source: abagond.wordpress.com

Black Angst: Outside The Quite Visible Black Backpack

 

A professor at Seattle Pacific University recently told me that she requires her students to read Peggy McIntosh’s essay, White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.

educating students cannot simply stop with an acknowledgment about the unearned advantages that Whites have, but educators must also provide a narrative from  the opposite viewpoint and a history about what had to happen in order to allow for hierarchies and such privileges. -Angela Tucker

“My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture.I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will.” -Ms. McIntosh
 
Ordinary privileges cannot be had for Blacks, without a fight as this country is founded upon a widespread enslavement and systemic genocidal dispossession of my entire race. -Angela Tucker

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Source: theadoptedlife.com

Social justice class removed as direct result of the systematic racism that it was teaching students about

 

“Yasab, the student of color, is NOT intended to be muted. If you cannot hear his audio, it is due to an issue with channels on certain systems. He has very important input and I am working on fixing it as fast as I can.”

A couple of articles on the removal:

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/arch…

http://news.yahoo.com/popular-seattle…

http://blogs.seattletimes.com/opinion…

 

Source: ladysugatits.tumblr.com

 

This reminds me of when an Arizona school district canceled Mexican-American studies.