July Shares - Teaching and Learning While White and Whitelash
My writing in July has been limited due to the start of a new job, and I definitely need to find the time to continue to balance my ongoing intake (reading) with some output (writing). I finished two books recently. The first, Learning and Teaching While White, by Jenna Chandler-Ward and Elizbeth Denevi, is another book I would add to my list of great reads for educator book groups. The second, American Whitelash by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wesley Lowery, looks at the history of backlash in our country towards any form of racial progress.
Despite the fact that some people might not see a clear connection between the two books, the fact of the matter is that when we fail to teach a full history of our country and have explicit conversations around race with children, the outcomes are a clear and present danger for all of us. As Chandler-Ward and Denevi point out, “The resistance to antiracism is not new; it just changes and morphs to meet the current political climate…White people as a group have not told the truth of the violence and oppression that white dominance requires now or has required in the past.”
The connection to American Whitelash is the direct line that can be drawn from resistance to antiracism efforts to violence. Lowery shares the following quote from Carol Anderson’s White Rage which sums up the cycles of violence that have occurred since our country’s founding: “The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement. White rage doesn’t have to wear sheets, burn crosses, or take to the streets…It can look like white flight and private schools and city ordinances and neighborhood watches.”
The book goes on to highlight many other things that white rage can look like including insurrections that are called protests and over a decade of reporting from U.S. intelligence agencies on the growth of white domestic terrorist groups which have been ignored by our politicians (who are comprised of a majority of white men).
Moving on from these two books, which I highly recommend, another example of what happens when we don’t educate all of our students about our history through an explicit antiracism lens hit the headlines with a song from Jason Aldean titled 'Try That in a Small Town.'
It’s hard to see how the lyrics for this song, coupled with the backdrop for the video, could not lead to an open-minded adult seeing the inherent racism. There is just no middle ground here. And the fact that this song quickly rose to the top on the Country Music Charts and iTunes is both sad and unsurprising given the political climate in our country and the fact that we instill a white-washed version of history in our schools. For a deeper dive into this issue, check out Danielle Moodie’s interview with Dr. Jonathan Metzl, author of Dying of Whiteness, on her Woke AF Daily podcast.
AI’s future worries us. So does AI’s present - from the Boston Globe
The process of training AI systems comes at a high environmental cost. Moreover, the harms of AI are not equally distributed. Existing AI systems often reinforce societal structures that marginalize people of color, women, and LGBT+ people, particularly in the criminal justice system or health care. The people developing and deploying AI technologies are rarely representative of the population at large, and bias is baked into large models from the get-go via the data the systems are trained on.
Cambridge schools are divided over middle school algebra - from the Boston Globe
Interesting article about one school district’s approach to providing equitable access to higher-level math classes and whether the decision is having the intended impact.
Moms for Liberty - Patriots or Hate-riots?
While the Moms for Liberty refer to themselves as “Joyful Warriors” and a grassroots organization, the following article from Salon acknowledges that there is a great deal of money funding the group from well-established conservative groups. Moms for Liberty: "Joyful Warriors" in the fight to demolish public school | Salon.com.
Meanwhile, The Southern Poverty Law Center describes the group as follows: “Moms for Liberty is a far-right organization that engages in anti-student inclusion activities and self-identifies as part of the modern parental rights movement. The group grew out of opposition to public health regulations for COVID-19, opposes LGBTQ+ and racially inclusive school curriculum, and has advocated books bans.”
Also, here is an overview from the Southern Poverty Law Center of the “Joyful Warrior National Summit held at the end of June by the Moms for Liberty.