Sports and sporting organizations have been a productive arena for our class’ focus on institutionalized forms of oppression. Check out this interesting crowd-sourced inquiry into the language that’s used to describe athletes from different racial backgrounds. Click on the pic for more.
http://time.com/89482/dear-privileged-at-princeton-you-are-privileged-and-meritocracy-is-a-myth/
The definitive response to the Princeton Privilege Blues published last week.
The Boston Area Social Justice Educators’ conference is one of the best places to meet people who can hang with your thinking after our social contexts class. I hope included in your theory of change is doing things collectively, which means you need others. This is a place to be in continued good conversations. Registration is free; excellent speakers. Peep game.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/04/mfa-vs-poc.html
Award-winning author Junot Díaz on the ways that graduate programs at predominantly white institutions (PWIs) are counter to the interests, and vibrancy of People of Color. Although he doesn’t use the term, it’s related to what bell hooks calls the phenomenon of ‘eating the other,’ that frequently occurs when whiteness (the idea that all that is Euro-descendant is better) goes unchallenged.
The Union of Minority Neighborhoods (a key grassroots org in Boston) is hosting a two-day forum to engage the persistent issues 40 years after forced busing in Boston
Public campaign via social media May 1, 2, and 3 to promote the need for books with characters from nondominant backgrounds. Click on the photo for more info
If you do anything for this, please post to our blog!
Flipping the script on Native American history
Excellent piece that helps to lift up how passively Indigenous peoples are discussed, relative to European invaders, in most U.S. history textbooks. I’m curious from others in the class what populations were depicted as the default protagonists in your history texts.
By all means, watch the whole thing if you wish, but at minute 1:01, a poorly framed question about ‘chicks and science’ leads to sheer brilliance from renowned scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson.
He addresses the poorly framed question about biological differences between genders by pointing out that if we don’t first work from an understanding of
“What is the blood on the tracks that I happened to survive that others did not? Simply because the forces of society prevented it at every turn. At every turn.”
Social Contexts of Education 