4 ms·

thanks for the thoughtful reply i mostly agree with the most of your reasoning, i guess for me i don't see it as a huge issue personally... i come from a mixed

thanks for the thoughtful reply i mostly agree with the most of your reasoning, i guess for me i don't see it as a huge issue personally... i come from a mixed background so learning about how my ancestors were treated didn't make me feel victimized... but n=1 and all that i'd like to see some studies about these things than just our personal experiences tbh > We didn’t cover German, Italian, and Irish immigration in K-12. Maybe we spent a day talking about Ellis Island. More importantly, we never learned anything about the discrimination against those groups. its hard to discuss this because curriculum varies widely depending on where you went to school (for me these were quite thoroughly covered), again it would be good to have some studies/data > If you’re going to teach about the Chinese Exclusion Act, also teach the German American kids about when states banned the teaching of German. Teach Italian and Irish kids about anti-Catholic school legislation. i think thats totally fair > My kids don’t need to learn Asian American history from some white lady. while i can totally understand this feeling (i've thought this myself at times) how do you know a priori the teacher will be white? and furthermore, does it really matter in the end as long as they are fair?

rayiner 4y ago
> while i can totally understand this feeling (i've thought this myself at times) how do you know a priori the teacher will be white? and furthermore, does it really matter in the end as long as they are fair? 80% of public school teachers are white, and outside majority-minority schools, it’s 90%+. And I think for this issue, it makes a difference. Parents of white kids have a fundamentally different stake in these issues than parents of minority kids. As a parent of brown kids, my concern is about ensuring their success in a society where they will always be visibly different. I don’t think it’s an especially racist society, but being different is always a liability. (And if it was as racist a country as many white people say it is, that would be even more reason to teach my kids to keep their heads down and their mouths shut!) By contrast, in my experience, white people overwhelmingly think of these issues in terms of what they want their white kids to learn about how to treat “other people.”

rayiner 4y ago

> while i can totally understand this feeling (i've thought this myself at times) how do you know a priori the teacher will be white? and furthermore, does it really matter in the end as long as they are fair? 80% of public school teachers are white, and outside majority-minority schools, it’s 90%+. And I think for this issue, it makes a difference. Parents of white kids have a fundamentally different stake in these issues than parents of minority kids. As a parent of brown kids, my concern is about ensuring their success in a society where they will always be visibly different. I don’t think it’s an especially racist society, but being different is always a liability. (And if it was as racist a country as many white people say it is, that would be even more reason to teach my kids to keep their heads down and their mouths shut!) By contrast, in my experience, white people overwhelmingly think of these issues in terms of what they want their white kids to learn about how to treat “other people.”