GOP 'protecting' our schools

[Politesse]

The reality of the history of Sesame Street, of course, is that the only Black-coded muppet in the show's history, despite being quite popular as a character, was cancelled after a season due to a letter writing campaign from angry white parents who thought he was a "bad example" to their kids due to his AAVE-shaded language.

But I guess if we want to teach that history, we have to pretend that we don't know the race of the complainers, or why they were really uncomfortable?

Meanwhile, Trausti is clearly angry about the two new, more explicitly Black muppets who were added to the cast last month. And we are also supposed to pretend we don't know why he's upset about that. Certainly, we musn't dare suggest that racism is involved.

 

[Bomb#20]

Teaching what happened in history is not "teaching racial collective guilt".

Jesus christ, Poli. Teaching history should NOT include insinuating that children TODAY are bad people and guilty for what SOMEONE ELSE did...

No one does say that.

No one? What about this guy?

Of course not. But history should be taught as it happened, not as a propagandized mess reformulated to excuse the actions and motivations of the powerful. Redlining is the formalization of a desire to create all-white neighborhoods. It is not and never was anything else. You cannot accurately describe the practice as anything other than a white sergregationist social project.

I don't disagree. But you can do that without blaming a specific race.

How? It was about creating all-white neighborhoods. Explicitly. In the law. You can't explain this without mentioning race, or the role of the white middle class in supporting it. It did. That's just facts. Quotes. Recorded history. If you pretend they had any other goal, you're going to have to ignore pretty much every primary document involved.

You explicitly endorsed teaching history by blaming a specific race. If you think there's an iota of difference between "blaming a specific race" and "teaching racial collective guilt", you're delusional.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

No one does say that.

No one? What about this guy?

Of course not. But history should be taught as it happened, not as a propagandized mess reformulated to excuse the actions and motivations of the powerful. Redlining is the formalization of a desire to create all-white neighborhoods. It is not and never was anything else. You cannot accurately describe the practice as anything other than a white sergregationist social project.

I don't disagree. But you can do that without blaming a specific race.

How? It was about creating all-white neighborhoods. Explicitly. In the law. You can't explain this without mentioning race, or the role of the white middle class in supporting it. It did. That's just facts. Quotes. Recorded history. If you pretend they had any other goal, you're going to have to ignore pretty much every primary document involved.

You explicitly endorsed teaching history by blaming a specific race. If you think there's an iota of difference between "blaming a specific race" and "teaching racial collective guilt", you're delusional.

So you believe Politesse's position is that we need to teach in school that the white race en masse is responsible for red lining, or racism in America in general?

I don't recall Politesse having expressed such radical opinions in the past.

 

[Mumbles]

Thomas Sowell also claims that Oama was a "race hustler" and that Joe Biden's election means that America's at a "point of no return" for economics and freedoms.

(Never mind that most people continue to say, despite SOwell's nonsense, that people *should* be evaluated equally - but that they are decidedly are not)

I have to be right, this black guy agrees with me!

Despite your racism, he is not wrong. CRT is a betrayal of liberalism.

Well, in the sense tht it tends to disabuse people of the notion that "nobody sees color", yes.

Of course, people absolutely *do* see race, as indicated in a wealth of studies, repeated attempts to explicitly steer law enforcement to harass random people based on skin color (eg. Michael Bloomberg's "stop and frisk" program), and the like so that's fine. But in any case, Sowell is arguing against a strawman - as he often does when he wades into any topic outside of economics.

 

[laughing dog]

No one does say that.

No one? What about this guy?

Of course not. But history should be taught as it happened, not as a propagandized mess reformulated to excuse the actions and motivations of the powerful. Redlining is the formalization of a desire to create all-white neighborhoods. It is not and never was anything else. You cannot accurately describe the practice as anything other than a white sergregationist social project.

I don't disagree. But you can do that without blaming a specific race.

How? It was about creating all-white neighborhoods. Explicitly. In the law. You can't explain this without mentioning race, or the role of the white middle class in supporting it. It did. That's just facts. Quotes. Recorded history. If you pretend they had any other goal, you're going to have to ignore pretty much every primary document involved.

You explicitly endorsed teaching history by blaming a specific race. If you think there's an iota of difference between "blaming a specific race" and "teaching racial collective guilt", you're delusional.

Accurately assigning responsibility (i.e. to blame) for actions and policy is one of the goals of teaching history well. It is delusional to think otherwise.

Now, that does not mean that people of race ____ (you fill in the blank) today are to blame for the policies and actions of people of that race in the past.

 

[TomC]

Jesus Christ, conservatives are obsessed with "blame"...

It's not just conservatives. Or white people. Or black people. Or men. Or women. Or Christians. Or Democrats. Or whatever.

It's a human tendency.

You aren't different.
Tom

 

[ideologyhunter]

I taught "social studies" (what a repulsive title!) to the 5th grade for about 15 years. The focus was American history, and it became my favorite subject because, as with reading class, a good teacher can dramatize the material and make it stick in the students' minds. Back when I taught, Phyllis Schlafly (sp.?) was making a lot of noise about public school curriculum, and I remember seeing a clip of her on TV saying that, among other subjects, she did not think that slavery was something children should learn about. She said something about how it had been abolished more than a century ago and that no country had given more freedom to more people than the U.S.A. I thought -- and still think -- that she was full of baloney. My opinion: a country needs a conscience, and part of improving your country is knowing its flaws, and this country, in company with many other countries, has a long and often tortured history of racial strife, racial inequities, and racism.
My students learned about the slave ships (they saw the old drawing of slaves packed like rows of sardines in the hold), and they learned about plantation life. When we talked about fugitive slaves, I added the story of Henry Brown, the slave who shipped himself to freedom in a wooden crate, and I brought in a big cardboard box that was cut to just the size of his crate. We put a student or two in the box and let each one emerge 'free.'
Later in the year they learned about Jim Crow, about Emmett Till, and about the heroes of the Civil Rights Era.
They also learned about William Lloyd Garrison and Lincoln and the Underground Railroad.
All of these are sensitive subjects and a teacher needs to have a clear idea of how to present each one.
And Schlafly was an idiot.

 

[Politesse]

No one does say that.

No one? What about this guy?

Of course not. But history should be taught as it happened, not as a propagandized mess reformulated to excuse the actions and motivations of the powerful. Redlining is the formalization of a desire to create all-white neighborhoods. It is not and never was anything else. You cannot accurately describe the practice as anything other than a white sergregationist social project.

I don't disagree. But you can do that without blaming a specific race.

How? It was about creating all-white neighborhoods. Explicitly. In the law. You can't explain this without mentioning race, or the role of the white middle class in supporting it. It did. That's just facts. Quotes. Recorded history. If you pretend they had any other goal, you're going to have to ignore pretty much every primary document involved.

You explicitly endorsed teaching history by blaming a specific race. If you think there's an iota of difference between "blaming a specific race" and "teaching racial collective guilt", you're delusional.

Blame is not critical to understanding, but teaching the facts of what happened is critical. If someone is saying that an eight year old kid in a classroom is personally responsible for all of white supremacy, that's wrong and gross. But if you start censoring history to avoid discussing "divisive topics", you aren't just sparing the feelings of cute little kids in classrooms. You're obscuring the racist actions of the past, and denying children the opportunity to learn why the world around them is at it is. If you hide the reality of slavery, muddle the history of the Klan and its operation within the government, politely ignore Plessy v Ferguson, decline to mention redlining, you are yourself engaging in racial discrimination, erasing the past because you're afraid of what it might say about the present. But children deserve to know that past. They have to live in the present and future it has created, no matter how many lies are told to them about that past.

 

[Trausti]

I Refuse to Stand By While My Students Are Indoctrinated

“Antiracist” training sounds righteous, but it is the opposite of truth in advertising. It requires teachers like myself to treat students differently on the basis of race. Furthermore, in order to maintain a united front for our students, teachers at Grace are directed to confine our doubts about this pedagogical framework to conversations with an in-house “Office of Community Engagement” for whom every significant objection leads to a foregone conclusion. Any doubting students are likewise “challenged” to reframe their views to conform to this orthodoxy.

My school, like so many others, induces students via shame and sophistry to identify primarily with their race before their individual identities are fully formed. Students are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions. The morally compromised status of “oppressor” is assigned to one group of students based on their immutable characteristics. In the meantime, dependency, resentment and moral superiority are cultivated in students considered “oppressed.”

A recent faculty email chain received enthusiastic support for recommending that we “‘officially’ flag students” who appear “resistant” to the “culture we are trying to establish.”

When I questioned what form this resistance takes, examples presented by a colleague included “persisting with a colorblind ideology,” “suggesting that we treat everyone with respect,” “a belief in meritocracy,” and “just silence.”

 

[Trausti]

CRT pop quiz! Which is the "oppressor" affinity group and which the "oppressed" affinity group? Gotta know your place, folx!

 

[Elixir]

They're "fixing" it all right.

Both the religious right and the woke left have their idiocies.

Ah, the good old "both sides" trope. A handy little device.

This Country has completely lost its way, and now truly sucks.

We need another Sputnik moment.

I agree. But it's probably too late now that conservotards have licensed millions of people to invent their own realities.
If a "Sputnik moment" were to arrive, half of America wouldn't want it to be true and there would be plenty of politicians greedily gathering votes by telling them it's not - and the rubes would swallow the lie whole.

 

[Elixir]

You explicitly endorsed teaching history by blaming a specific race.

Bullshit. The fact that redlining was done by people who were all (mostly? - not specified) of the same race, is not an indictment of all people of that race (or races).
It is an indictment of those people, if in fact it is an indictment at all. Not their progeny or their progeny's progeny.
Painting it as such is merely an excuse for the revisionist history that is part and parcel of the New Republican Way. "Invent your own reality - it's YOUR free-dumb!"

 

[Politesse]

You explicitly endorsed teaching history by blaming a specific race.

Bullshit. The fact that redlining was done by people who were all (mostly? - not specified) of the same race, is not an indictment of all people of that race (or races). It is an indictment of those people. Not their progeny or their progeny's progeny. Painting it as such is merely an excuse for the revisionist history that is part and parcel of the New Republican Way.

I'm not even so concerned with the fact that redlining was mostly by a monoracial group, if indeed that's even so. What's critically important to understand is that was done on the basis of race, intentionally and explicitly, and that this is one of several reasons why predominately white vs predominately black neighborhoods today live in artificial isolation from one another.

None of this could be discussed at all without triggering the Rhode Island law. Despite the fact that I think it is incredibly unlikely a high school kid would listen to this history and go "Wow, I feel personally responsible for zoning laws that were voted in a decade before my parents were born, because I happen to have the same skin color as the city commissioner at the time!" Why would they? But they might, if they're smart or have a good teacher, go "Hang on a minute, is that why all of the shitty schools and crime are in the 'inner city', and all the nice stuff is out here, even though it's clear that this wasn't always the case? Is that why I, as a kid who grew up in this neighborhood, never once had to worry about being a victim of a drive-by shooting while I walked to school unattended? Might there be a legitimate reason why people who do live in those neihgborhoods get angry sometimes at laws that seem aimed at persecuting those very neighborhoods and keeping them poor on the supposed basis of 'equal treatment' that was never actually all that equal because the dice was set for those kids forty years before either of us were born?"

And that's what Republicans are really afraid of, if by Republicans you mean the politicians who write laws like this. But you can't say that. So you paint a portrait of a mean evil Black Lady seminar-giver making innocent white children cry, and pretend that teaching history is what caused that, rather than acknowledging the role of history itself in building systems of mutual but unequal racial animus. And republicans, ie., the actual folks who vote in the politicians and post angry hurt things on social media, are easily convinced of this false narrative. Because they've never heard of Plessy v Ferguson, or redlining, or all the rest. Because unlike in Rhode Island, if you live in Detroit you don't need a law to prevent history teachers from teaching history, they'll vounteer. So the first time they learn about any of this is when the smart man on the radio starts ranting about CRT and how devastating it is to the poor innocent white kids. Well, who wouldn't be outraged about that? Those mean old black people and self-hating bleeding heart liberals from Brown, why can't they just leave "us" alone!

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Thomas Sowell also claims that Oama was a "race hustler" and that Joe Biden's election means that America's at a "point of no return" for economics and freedoms.

(Never mind that most people continue to say, despite SOwell's nonsense, that people *should* be evaluated equally - but that they are decidedly are not)

I have to be right, this black guy agrees with me!

Despite your racism, he is not wrong. CRT is a betrayal of liberalism.

Technically, you are the one that cited an economist on a discussion not remotely about economics that happened to agree with you because of the color of their skin.

 

[Emily Lake]

The reality of the history of Sesame Street, of course, is that the only Black-coded muppet in the show's history, despite being quite popular as a character, was cancelled after a season due to a letter writing campaign from angry white parents who thought he was a "bad example" to their kids due to his AAVE-shaded language.

But I guess if we want to teach that history, we have to pretend that we don't know the race of the complainers, or why they were really uncomfortable?

You are seriously arsoning the hell out of that strawman.

 

[Emily Lake]

Accurately assigning responsibility (i.e. to blame) for actions and policy is one of the goals of teaching history well. It is delusional to think otherwise.

Now, that does not mean that people of race ____ (you fill in the blank) today are to blame for the policies and actions of people of that race in the past.

I agree with that - conceptually. The difficulty is that in many cases, what is being applied in schools actually *is* laying blame on an entire group of people today on the basis of their skin color. And not blame for something *they* did, but something that other people with the same skin color did in the past. That's the problem.

And that's specifically a problem with how CRT is being *applied* in the real world, outside of the academic laboratory.

 

[Emily Lake]

Blame is not critical to understanding, but teaching the facts of what happened is critical. If someone is saying that an eight year old kid in a classroom is personally responsible for all of white supremacy, that's wrong and gross. But if you start censoring history to avoid discussing "divisive topics", you aren't just sparing the feelings of cute little kids in classrooms. You're obscuring the racist actions of the past, and denying children the opportunity to learn why the world around them is at it is. If you hide the reality of slavery, muddle the history of the Klan and its operation within the government, politely ignore Plessy v Ferguson, decline to mention redlining, you are yourself engaging in racial discrimination, erasing the past because you're afraid of what it might say about the present. But children deserve to know that past. They have to live in the present and future it has created, no matter how many lies are told to them about that past.

Poli, nobody in this thread is suggesting that history should be censored, or that we should avoid difficult topics.

Read the actual bill, it's only 3 pages:
http://webserver.rilin.state.ri.us/BillText/BillText21/HouseText21/H6070.pdf

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Accurately assigning responsibility (i.e. to blame) for actions and policy is one of the goals of teaching history well. It is delusional to think otherwise.

Now, that does not mean that people of race ____ (you fill in the blank) today are to blame for the policies and actions of people of that race in the past.

I agree with that - conceptually. The difficulty is that in many cases, what is being applied in schools actually *is* laying blame on an entire group of people today on the basis of their skin color. And not blame for something *they* did, but something that other people with the same skin color did in the past. That's the problem.

And that's specifically a problem with how CRT is being *applied* in the real world, outside of the academic laboratory.

Actually is? So it is endemic in schools. That shouldn’t be hard to prove. I mean I noticed you assumed your presumption was accurate, but it actually is unsubstantiated and meaningless.

 

[Bomb#20]

You explicitly endorsed teaching history by blaming a specific race.

<expletive deleted>. The fact that redlining was done by people who were all (mostly? - not specified) of the same race, is not an indictment of all people of that race (or races).
It is an indictment of those people, if in fact it is an indictment at all. Not their progeny or their progeny's progeny.
Painting it as such is merely an excuse for the revisionist history that is part and parcel of the New Republican Way. "Invent your own reality - it's YOUR free-dumb!"

Why did you write that? Did you not read the exchange I quoted? Did you just skim it and assume you got the gist of it from 15% of the words in it? Or are you just so accustomed to judging who's right by whether they agree with you that you felt entitled to ignore the plain meaning of what I wrote and invent a position to ascribe to me that would justify you in believing I'm wrong and cursing at me over it? What is wrong with you?

Sorry to be Captain Obvious here, but I'm going to have to, because what you wrote was painfully obtuse. I did not in any way, shape or form suggest that pointing out that redlining was done by people who were of the same race is an indictment of all people of that race. The fact that Politesse pointed it out, and the fact that subsequently I accused him of blaming a specific race, does not entitle you to take for granted that that's why I accused him. He's said a lot of things. You picked out one of the things he's said and you decided, on your own initiative, that that was the one that prompted the accusation. That's a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Moreover, to reach that conclusion, you had to skip over something else I quoted him writing, something that came between the remark you fastened onto and my response to him. Why would you do that? Why would you assume the more recent remark I quoted was irrelevant to the accusation?

Politesse said redlining was a white segregationist social project and history should be taught that way.

Then Trausti agreed with him, but pointed out we can do that without blaming a specific race.

Then Politesse said --> "How?" <--.

Those two remarks in combination are an endorsement of teaching history by blaming a specific race. Politesse advocated teaching that redlining was a white segregationist social project even though he did not believe that could be taught without blaming a specific race.

So get off my case.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

And what is the relevance? You realize what the Babylon Bee is, don't you?