You know you’ve paid too much for your Liberal Arts degree when you start asking yourself and others this question.
What Can Educators Do To End White Supremacy In The Classroom?
The city of Madison hosted the 15th annual national White Privilege Conference last week at the Monona Terrace to discuss issues of white supremacy, social justice, education and the Tea Party. The MacIver Institute attended multiple breakout sessions and will be releasing our highlights over the next couple days.
Our first account comes from the breakout session titled Stories from the front lines of education: Confessions of a white, high school English teacher.
The session was facilitated by Kim Radersma, a former high school English teacher in California and Colorado. Radersma is currently working toward her Ph. D. in critical whiteness studies at Brock University in Ontario, Canada.
Radersma argued that teachers must fight against the oppressive structure in education and society. She said anyone who is going into teaching and education must be a political figure.
“Teaching is a political act, and you can’t choose to be neutral. You are either a pawn used to perpetuate a system of oppression or you are fighting against it,” Radersma said during the session. “And if you think you are neutral, you are a pawn.”
She said educators need to challenge the system, otherwise they are giving in to white supremacy.
The first step of her plan is likely to stop issuing grades to students. Just pass them through the system. The next is probably to stop requiring math, science and English courses for graduation. This way, no one will be able to point out that she’s an idiot.
I wonder if the lack of facing real racism and white supremacy has left modern libs seeing boogeymen which aren’t there. We have a black president, plenty of non-white people in Congress, no one bats an eye at interracial marriage, TV and movies are full of people from all colors of the rainbow, and there’s plenty of rich non-white people out there (Tyler Perry, and the previous owner of FUBU who is now on ‘Shark Tank’ come to mind). Yet liberals are still going with the white supremacy and white privilege memes. To me, it stinks of old Mao-style self-criticism; “Well, you may not be outwardly racist, but there’s some minor things you do/say we don’t like, and thus we’re going to say you’re unconsciously racist.”
And you never hear about “Asian privilege” or “black privilege”, etc. Sometimes I wonder if the whole privilege thing is just shaming by racial basis.
The MacIver institute is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Onion, they just don’t realize it.
I’ve come across some really demented thinking in my time as a teacher, but that shit’s right over the top of the pole-vault bar, with a goodly distance to spare. Delusional doesn’t even some close to describing that mental state.