In which we are proud...
Apr. 7th, 2009 09:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jesshartleyI'm continually amazed at how flippin' awesome and wickedly smart the Valkyrie is.
She's doing some Social Studies homework and they're discussing the Civil Rights movement. She noticed that, while African-Americans are referred to as such in her text, they still refer to Caucasian people as "Whites" (note not only color reference, but capitalization).
She came to ask me about this, and we had a great discussion about underlying (rather than blatant) racism, the good/evil, clean/dirty analogies of calling people by color labels (especially white/black) and the like.
Afterwards, she wrote up a very nice and polite letter to her teacher and requested that they discuss this example of inherent and underlying racism in the class, because it was a very specific example of how even in a text that pre-supposes that the hey-day of racism has passed, remnants of those times still remain.
I hope that he (and the rest of the class) are up for the discussion.
She's doing some Social Studies homework and they're discussing the Civil Rights movement. She noticed that, while African-Americans are referred to as such in her text, they still refer to Caucasian people as "Whites" (note not only color reference, but capitalization).
She came to ask me about this, and we had a great discussion about underlying (rather than blatant) racism, the good/evil, clean/dirty analogies of calling people by color labels (especially white/black) and the like.
Afterwards, she wrote up a very nice and polite letter to her teacher and requested that they discuss this example of inherent and underlying racism in the class, because it was a very specific example of how even in a text that pre-supposes that the hey-day of racism has passed, remnants of those times still remain.
I hope that he (and the rest of the class) are up for the discussion.
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no subject
Date: 2009-04-08 04:46 am (UTC)