Yes and it sounds like the critics were responding to the new movie and not so much the book. My point was that the criticism of "white savior" seems more of a Liberal than Conservative thing.
I would just want to add that after presenting a novel that had a white savior, a novel with a black protagonist would be presented and studied as well. Then compare the two and make connections. Ask questions about the differences.
Would also add that the bookburners want you to think that taking something off the reading list is the same as their book banning campaigns. It's not.
Why Book Ban Efforts Are Spreading Across the U.S. - The New York Times (nytimes.com) Book ban efforts spread across the US | bdnews24.com In Wyoming, a county prosecutor’s office considered charges against library employees for stocking books like “Sex Is a Funny Word” and “This Book Is Gay.” In Oklahoma, a bill was introduced in the state Senate that would prohibit public school libraries from keeping books on hand that focus on sexual activity, sexual identity or gender identity. In Tennessee, the McMinn County Board of Education voted to remove the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel “Maus” from an eighth-grade module on the Holocaust because of nudity and curse words. Parents, activists, school board officials and lawmakers around the country are challenging books at a pace not seen in decades. The American Library Association said in a preliminary report that it received an “unprecedented” 330 reports of book challenges, each of which can include multiple books, in the fall. “It’s a pretty startling phenomenon here in the United States to see book bans back in style, to see efforts to press criminal charges against school librarians,” said Suzanne Nossel, chief executive of free-speech organisation PEN America, even if efforts to press charges have so far failed. Such challenges have long been a staple of school board meetings, but it isn’t just their frequency that has changed, according to educators, librarians and free-speech advocates — it is also the tactics behind them and the venues where they play out. Conservative groups in particular, fuelled by social media, are now pushing the challenges into statehouses, law enforcement and political races. ... In the Mukilteo School District in Washington State, the school board voted this week to remove “To Kill a Mockingbird” — voted the best book of the past 125 years in a survey of readers conducted by The New York Times Book Review — from the ninth-grade curriculum at the request of staff members. Their objections included arguments that the novel marginalized characters of color, celebrated “white saviorhood” and used racial slurs dozens of times without addressing their derogatory nature. While the book is no longer a requirement, it remains on the district’s list of approved novels, and teachers can still choose to assign it if they wish. In other instances, efforts to ban books are more sweeping, as parents and organizations aim to have them removed from libraries, cutting off access for everyone. Perhaps no book has been targeted more vigorously than “The 1619 Project,” a best seller about slavery in America that has drawn wide support among many historians and Black leaders and which arose from the 2019 special issue of The New York Times Magazine. It has been named explicitly in proposed legislation. Political leaders on the right have seized on the controversies over books. The newly elected governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, rallied his supporters by framing book bans as an issue of parental control and highlighted the issue in a campaign ad featuring a mother who wanted Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” to be removed from her son’s high school curriculum. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott demanded that the state’s education agency “investigate any criminal activity in our public schools involving the availability of p*rnography,” a move that librarians in the state fear could make them targets of criminal complaints. The governor of South Carolina asked the state’s superintendent of education and its law enforcement division to investigate the presence of “obscene and pornographic” materials in its public schools, offering “Gender Queer” as an example. The mayor of Ridgeland, Miss., recently withheld funding from the Madison County Library System, saying he would not release the money until books with L.G.B.T.Q. themes were removed, according to the library system’s executive director. George M. Johnson, the author of “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” a memoir about growing up Black and queer, was stunned in November to learn that a school board member in Flagler County, Fla., had filed a complaint with the sheriff’s department against the book. Written for readers aged 14 and older, it includes scenes that depict oral and anal sex and sexual assault. “I didn’t know that was something you could do, file a criminal complaint against a book,” Johnson said in an interview. The complaint was dismissed by the sheriff’s office, but the book was subsequently removed from school libraries while it was reviewed by a committee. At a school board meeting where the book was debated, a group of students protested the ban and distributed free copies, while counterprotesters assailed it as p*rnography and occasionally screamed obscenities and anti-gay slurs, according to a student who organised the protest and posted video footage of the event. Johnson made a video appearance at the meeting and argued that the memoir contained valuable lessons about consent and that it highlighted difficult issues that teenagers are likely to encounter in their lives. A district committee reviewed the book and determined it was “appropriate for use” in high school libraries, but the decision was overruled by the county superintendent, who told the school board that “All Boys Aren’t Blue” would be kept out of libraries, while new policies are created to allow parents to have more control over which books their children can access. Several other young adult titles that had been challenged and removed were restored. ...
@SamFisher told me Maus was banned, but it's apparently still in the Haus, just in the high school curriculum, not 8th grade. more deadspin fake outrage.
Where do you see that? Reading through the meeting minutes, someone brought up the fact that the book was taught in HS freshman year curriculum last year (not in current curriculum) and it would also be impacted (page 16). link to minutes Here's McMinn board's response to the outcry. It sure sounds like the book was removed from all of the McMinn County Schools. I am all ears if you have a source saying that they're putting it in the high school curriculum. Thanks.
Yea, because it's a manufactured subject by conspiracy theorists as not a single high school (or below) in America teaches CRT. So any discussion on the topic is just straw man and now we have spent tax money to fix a non-existent problem. Is that what you mean by horse crap?
I do not believe that this is a true statement see for example Hispanic Students Were Forced To Learn Critical Race Theory. They Hated It. Kali Fontanilla discovered that not only was CRT being taught in the classroom—her minority students were failing it. https://reason.com/2022/01/31/critical-race-theory-taught-in-classroom-california/ which includes among other things lecture slides from lesson plans: excerpt: During the 2020 fall semester, Kali Fontanilla—a high school English language teacher working in the Salinas, California, school district—noticed that many of her students were failing one of their other classes: ethnic studies. This was at the height of the pandemic, and instruction was entirely online, leaving many students in the lurch. Still, Fontanilla thought it was odd to see so many Fs. Salinas has a majority Mexican population; all of Fontanilla's students were Hispanic and were learning English as a second language. Education officials who propose adding ethnic studies to various curriculums—and making it mandatory, as the Salinas school district did—typically intend for privileged white students to learn about other cultures. There's a certain irony in requiring members of an ethnic minority to study this, and an even greater irony in the fact that such students were struggling intensely with the course. "My students are failing ethnic studies," says Fontanilla, who is of Jamaican ancestry. "I would say half of them are failing this ethnic studies class." This made Fontanilla curious about what the course was teaching. All of the high school's teachers used the same online platform to post lesson plans and course materials, so Fontanilla decided to take a look. She was shocked by what she saw. "This was like extreme left brainwashing of these kids," says Fontanilla. "Critical race theory all throughout the lessons, from start to finish. The whole thing." Critical race theory, or CRT, has become a flashpoint in the debate about what kids ought to be learning in public schools. Originally an obscure, left-wing body of thought that mostly appeared in graduate schools, critics charge it with influencing diversity workshops for major corporations, training seminars for teachers, and even K-12 curricula. Parental concerns about CRT became a major flashpoint in the 2020 Virginia gubernatorial race. After winning the race and taking office, Republican challenger Glenn Youngkin's first act was to ban CRT. Many adherents of CRT deny that it's taught to primary education students, and the mainstream media have been quick to line up behind such claims. That's why Fontanilla's discovery was so significant. "The teacher had the kids all learn about the four I's of oppression," says Fontanilla. The four I's were institutional, internalized, ideological, and interpersonal oppression. "And then there was a whole presentation on critical race theory and they actually had the students analyze the school through critical race theory." Slides from lesson plans provided by Fontanilla confirm that the ethnic studies course references critical race theory by name. more at the link
Oh man it almost feels like your intention here is to provoke and be the center of attention. If you need that in your life, contact me and we can set up a party for you to celebrate your life of you feel like you need more attention towards yourself. I'm serious. Some people express depression and loneliness by doing what you are doing now.
too long to copy here, but well worth reading How To Talk About Racism Linguist John McWhorter on the ways social justice activists have betrayed black Americans. https://reason.com/2022/02/01/how-to-talk-about-racism/
It was presumptive, not solution oriented, and a little naive. Especially the idea that John Edwards as President would have also inspired the Tea Party. I prefer something like this which advocates a direction towards improvement.
I don't know man, I thought that was a horrendous read. Effectively, what the guy does is take issues, and say "yeah, but its not 100% like we think, so they're wrong to think of it that way, and i'm right!". See: "I think that civil rights up to about 1966 and [black activist] Stokely Carmichael and people yelling "black power" and not knowing what it meant—that's where it went wrong." .... referring to modern racism... Um, he thinks the racist problem with America today is BECAUSE of the civil rights movement??? lol. How about: "The saddest thing in the world is that it's become quite clear over the passage of time that the way both of those events were portrayed was complete myth. I was behind the people protesting both of those cases at the time. I now feel fooled, just like we all feel fooled by, bless his heart, Colin Powell. What happened to Trayvon Martin was not that he was killed unjustifiably by George Zimmerman. It was an unfortunate episode, but Trayvon Martin was also a very different person than we're led to think. And then also with Mike Brown, it was a lie. For reasons we'll never know, he kept on charging at that police officer. The idea that [the officer who killed Brown] just shot this guy dead with his hands up in the air—it's false." ... so basically another guy that is like "well, they weren't saints either you know?!?!?!" yeah... we all know. The point isn't that they were necessarily heroes of humans, but that how they were treated is so light and day different than someone of white skin color doing the same thing. And we know this because we have countless countless countless evidence of such now with the proliferation of body cam footage and data. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01846-z Here's a strange one: "I worry these days that when people say blackness, what they mean is, roughly, not being buttoned up like Episcopalian whites. I worry that blackness is thought of as, roughly, jamming. I mean this as more than just dancing, but that there's something that black people are in touch with in terms of rhythm. That blackness is not being too exact—we're seeing that in so many educational materials. It runs throughout the culture that to be black is to not be precise, is to not be responsible for getting the exact answer. You have a rhythm; you jam. You don't sit in one place; it's about the beat. And I worry that [this sense of] blackness is primitive, you know?" Wtf? lol, this makes no sense. Not sure how one can read this and then think, wow this guy might be on to something!!! There's this: "In your book, you talk about ways to make things better for black Americans. You suggest three things: End the drug war, teach reading properly, and get past the idea that everyone should go to college.....So not only do you end the drug war, because it destroys black communities by creating that black market temptation that sends people to prison and often to death, but then you also want to have something to catch those men...." Yeah, duh, these things are better for EVERYBODY. But feel free to ignore the data... if you're black, you're like 4x more likely to be arrested and imprisoned for mar1juana. i thought it was all very poorly thought out.
I'll look forward to watching that full video when I get a bit of time, but I'll push back just a bit on the claim that McWhorter's interview wasn't "solution oriented." Perhaps not oriented toward solutions as FINAL or ultimate solutions (and honestly, who has one of those for the problems of racism and social injustice?), but he does recommend strategies. I think how they ended the interview was a good one: What are your rhetorical and discursive strategies for dealing with the "elect," your term for social-justice activists? There's a certain kind of person who thinks that battling power differentials is supposed to be central to everything we do. The idea is that those power differentials exist, and until they don't, everything else is fiddling while Rome burns. That kind of person, if you disagree with them, calls you a white supremacist. There are two things that we have to do: One is we have to get used to being called that name and walking on, instead of thinking that [being] called a racist on social media stains us like Hester Prynne. And two, that kind of person needs to be told, "No." I think a lot of us, especially since June 2020 and [the killing of] George Floyd, have thought, when that person comes along talking about social justice and hegemony and intersectionality, and tells you that we're going to change all of our procedures, and if you disagree, we're going to call you names on social media or get you fired, that our job is to say yes. The people calling for that need to be told no. They don't need to be abused, but just: "No. We don't agree with you that battling power differentials should be the center of our endeavor here. It will be one of about a dozen things that we do. It will not be the center. And if you don't like it, you have to leave. And I don't care what you call me." I actually think that's a fairly concrete recommendation and one that is easy to put into practice and implement. It also addresses the horrific tendency toward name-calling that is present in nearly every conversation about every issue. So again, I'd disagree (hopefully agreeably) with that assessment of the interview.
