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>In another story, an African-American mother tried to get her seven-year-old into a class at school. The principal said no: “That’s not the black class.” This
by foldr 3y ago
>In another story, an African-American mother tried to get her seven-year-old into a class at school. The principal said no: “That’s not the black class.” This was not a scene from the Jim Crow South of the 1950s, but from present-day America, where a growing number of “progressive” schools group children by race and teach them to think of themselves as “racial beings”, all in the name of “antiracism”.
This paragraph neatly illustrates the lack of historical context that often accompanies discussion of "cancel culture". On the one hand, we have an individual example of someone doing something stupid and arguably racist (possibly on the basis of some half-understood anti-racist philsophizing). But what should be our comparison point? The very paragraph I'm quoting mentions the Jim Crow South and yet fails to grasp the broader implications of this comparison. Wind the clock back a few decades and you could illustrate intentional racism in US schools just by gesturing to large swathes of the country. Now you have to grep /stooo*pid/ over a population of 330 million to find a good anecdote.
There's also some seriously sloppy journalism in this article. For example, how can they possibly have reliable enough stats on the number of "progressive schools" that "group children by race and teach them to think of themselves as 'racial beings'" to assert that this number is "growing"?
- t-3 3y ago> how can they possibly have reliable enough stats on the number of "progressive schools" that "group children by race and teach them to think of themselves as 'racial beings'" to assert that this number is "growing"? Polling students, teachers, and staff at educational institutions is big business. Everybody wants to know about trends in pork-barrel industries, and schools are one of the biggest opportunities. It's not at all unbelievable that the statistics exist and data has been collected.
- foldr 3y agoOk, it's not unbelievable in principle, but I'm not inclined to believe it if there's no source cited.
- t-3 3y ago> I'm not inclined to believe it if there's no source cited. Agreed. Unfortunately, most journalists seem to have gone to different schools with vastly different standards of teaching than the rest of us, and as such have never learned how to cite sources or even informally share links.
- jfengel 3y agoThe article is a book review, so it's a little hard to tell whether the underlying material cites its source. But the review itself does seem kind of uncritical. I can't tell the position of that anecdote in the book, but putting it front and center of the review seems pretty breathless.