Wednesday, February 12, 2014

A Peek Behind The Curtain

Pay attention, and people will tell you exactly what they're thinking:
With the best of intentions, colorblindness inadvertently renders students of color invisible.

Colorblindness can imply that there is something wrong with not being White, or that there is something embarrassing or insulting about acknowledging one’s race or ethnicity. Colorblind perspectives also may reproduce racial and cultural hegemony in school practices, such as curriculum choices, teacher expectations, testing procedures, instructional practices, and even more pedestrian tasks such as seating arrangements. Because of the growing racial diversity in the United States, it is vital for teachers to understand and have the capacity to acknowledge racial diversity, and create safe, affirming, and supportive learning environments for their students to develop the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to dialogue about race-related issues.

Emphasize that teaching is not a neutral act. It is highly political, and issues such as race and class are always tied to teaching.
As I read that, the author is equating "colorblind" to "white".  How did he make that leap?   How does judging people not by the color of their skin but on the content of their character (or their schoolwork) equate to "white"?

The author has some deep-seeded racial issues and is probably a racist.

BTW, this "helpful" racial advice was published by the NEA.

3 comments:

pseudotsuga said...

That article made me throw up a little in my mouth. It is clear that education schools, if Mr. Howard is a representative example, are big tanks of post-modern, politically correct Kool-Aid. When is there time to actually teach an actual subject, if we teachers are so concerned about the meta-subject and pandering to the current causus belli?

allen (in Michigan) said...

How does he make the leap? Because he's morally superior to those who don't see the world as he does. You need know nothing beyond that to understand the underlying logic although it does help to know that Mr. Howard is an Associate Professor of urban schooling, i.e. black schooling whatever the hell that is, and Faculty Director of Center X whatever the hell that is.

A bit of exploring on the Center X site - http://centerx.gseis.ucla.edu/ - doesn't yield a reason the letter "X" looms so large but the addiction of the left to explicit, even ham-handed, symbolism means the "X" almost certainly harks back to Malcolm X.

What just struck me as a possibly interesting thought is that the uniformity of view and language enforced to allow membership on the left makes Mr. Howard indistinguishable from any white lefty. Reading his piece, as much of it as I could take, there's no way divine a racial identity. Only that he can't find any reasons to ignore race but plenty of reasons to be obsessed with race.

If political persuasion's not as obvious as racial classification it seems to be rapidly getting more important.

Hube said...

MLK must have thought there "was something wrong with being non-white."

Ye gad.