Parents: White Teacher Should Not Teach Black History

I go to church with a lady who is from London, originally. Speaks with a beautiful English accent. She's an older lady and is very sweet.

I was telling her about my trip to Boston recently ("looks like i'm going to boston... ). I told her about seeing various sites of interest related to the American Revolution. I went on about "this site where they protested taxation without representation" and "this site where Paul Revere grew up", etc. All of a sudden it dawned on me....this lady is the freaking enemy!!! I'm sure she was thinking, "Listen you ragtag American...I'm a freaking Brit! You and your rebel scum friends may have gotten over...but we kicked your ass with the Spice Girls."

 

he means people shouldn't put race/ethnicity before nationality. we should all look at ourselves as fellow americans first.

gender is completely different...men and women are different...black people and asian people and white people are not fundamentally different. women and men are fundamentally different. a black man and an asian man still have the same body parts.

also, the way you say "but i will always be black" is something that kind of troubles me. its kind of a catch 22. black people were segregated because of race, but today black people have to act black to be accepted among some black people and that puts race before everything. so it kind of furthers the problems of integration in my eyes.

its funny "being black" is sort of a phenomenon. you'll see white people who "act black", but you'll never see a white guy act latino or chinese or japanese or indian or anything like that. i dunno just a side thought.

 

Don't too hooked on the term American. What I mean is, are you one of us or are you not? If today you went and lived the rest of your life in France, became a citizen, learned the langauge, wore berets and drank wine with every meal, you would still not be out of your element back in the States. You are a member of this society and I don't think you can ever break that. You may be able to join France's as well, but your relationship to American society is too intimate to be broken once it is mature.

But, the problem with this teacher thing and other forms of racism is that it attempts to sever that relationship. It used to be the white man saying, "you are not a member of our group." Nowadays (not that the former has yet died away), you see the minority saying, "I'm not a member of your group. We've got our own thing going." I don't find that attitude to be acceptable. The power relationship is different from the racism that spawned slavery, but the attitude is the same: one doesn't want to admit entrance to one's community based on the person's heritage. You can couch it in practical terms and say it is easier or more efficient or effective. But, that doesn't change the fact that parents want to reject the teacher based on his race and justifying that rejection to their children.

You can't change your ethnicity, that's true. But, the biological aspect of the ethnicity is inconsequential. The only thing of consequence is the social baggage we hang on it. And, that can be changed and has been changing over time. You can't change that you are black, but being black in 2003 doesn't mean the same thing as being black in 1953. But, how do you expect it to change when you cling to the baggage that once defined it?

Btw, funny you should mention German teachers. My history teacher in high school was a German and he would really just rant and rave about how evil the Nazis and even Germans, generally, were. That his ethnicity implicated him in the commission of the crime heightened his outrage about the whole thing.

 

Thats a really interesting point, which brings to mind reverse racism which has been simmering in the under currents of this thread for a while I think.

 

You ever see that movie 187 with Sam Jackson?

 

LOL. Great stuff!



robbie,

Interesting you brought this up. As a Chinese, I know Chinese people are proud of their heritage. Yet, I'd be the first one to point out some pretty shameful baggage in our ethnic characteristics. There have been some briliant Chinese thinkers in the last century who have pointed out the downside of Chinese culture. Some were too extreme and went overboard. But most of these people are respected. I can imagine if a black thinker did the same kind of critique against black heritage, he'd be fried.

 

nope

 

Apologies if this has already been covered, I have been away.


To those supporting the claim that only black teachers can/should teach black history, or at least that they are the only ones who can give it the proper perspective, I am saddened by your position.

Among the many problems with that assesment are:

*That only people of a similar race can have a proper perspective on a certain portion of history...if you go far enough with this thinking you have the very root of the problem of racism itself: racial experience seperates people's into cultural groups with incompatible perspectives. Read Hitler some time if you want to understand the danger that kind of thinking poses...Hitler began by praising the Jewish people for recognizing and protecting their racial and cultural purity as a reflection of seperate racial experiences which should remain seperate...that was his first step.

* That either black history somehow deserves special status, or that all subjects should only be taught by decendants of those most accutely involved. This again contradicts the very core of the argument against racism: that we are all the same. If we remove the element which links us all, the human element, and instead say that the important aspect of black history cannot be communicated by another human, as that is secondary, but only by another black person, we are raising the quality of 'black' above the quality of 'human'...ie building walls along racial lines rather than bridges along human lines. Racism, pure and simple.

* That only people of a certain ancestory can properly empathize with the plight of a particular group...ie only Jews really can feel the pain of the Holocaust...only women can truly feel the pain assosciated with rape victims...only Aremenians can truly understand Ararat...only Europeans can truly teach/understand most aspects of the World Wars. Obviously we can all feel the pain of injustice, can all empathize. WHether we do or not is not conditional to our race, and I find that assertion not only incorrect, but insulting and offensive.