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| Divinity, via Cold Belly. |
Apparently John McWhorter doesn't think being eminent in the field of linguistics qualifies anybody to talk about history or politics.
Took an undergrad course from him 20 yrs ago and he talked a LOT about Chomsky and how being a great linguist doesn’t make one an authority in any other field
— Gogi (@darealgogi) November 28, 2021
But it's OK if you're a Republican. That's where people really value amateurism.
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| Photo via Veterans Administration website We Are the Mighty. |
Reaction from a veteran border agent: “It will make patrolling extremely difficult, along with security. This is insane. The agents did nothing wrong. It makes me furious. Horses have been used since before the official founding of the Border Patrol.” https://t.co/FsFPyZRHNC
— Peter J. Hasson (@peterjhasson) September 23, 2021
I know now what unconscious process made me look up the official founding of
the Border Patrol when I saw that tweet, not because I already knew about it,
but because I didn't know about it and wondered why—I've often dipped into the
history of immigration and immigration enforcement on the blog, and you'd
think I would have heard of how the Border Patrol got started.
The main reason I hadn't heard about it, as it turns out, was that it happened at the same time as everything else, in 1924, during the Coolidge administration, when they passed the first general immigration law in the form of the National Origins Act; before that, the Mexican border was essentially open, Mexican and US citizens going back and forth across the border freely, unhindered except by customs agents collecting import duties on both sides.
"Wit & Wisdom," an English language arts curriculum, has been widely criticized in recent weeks by Williamson County parents.... Arguments against the curriculum fall into two buckets. The first being the belief that "Wit & Wisdom" content isn't appropriate for younger students, and the second being that the curriculum teaches concepts of critical race theory.
Community members and local advocacy organizations have come forward in disapproval of books like "Ruby Bridges Goes to School," "Separate is Never Equal," and "George vs. George," their argument being that teaching about the darker aspects of racism in United States history isn't appropriate in elementary grades.
One of the most vocal groups has been the Williamson County chapter of Moms for Liberty started earlier this year. The group includes members with children in and outside of Williamson County Schools. [Moms for Liberty head Robin Steenman] said she disapproves of guidance for teachers to teach words like "injustice," "unequal," "inequality," "protest," "marching" and "segregation" in grammar lessons.
—Anika Exum, Nashville Tennesseean, 11 June 2021
Long, long ago, there was a kindly, Republican chief justice called Earl Warren, and one day he heard that some people in Topeka were not judging children by the content of their character. Not in Tennessee! Topeka is in Kansas.
It was true. In those days there were schools in America where there were no African American children! This is hard for you to imagine, since schools in America are not like that now, except if your Mom for Liberty schools you at home or a special religious liberty school or if you don't have a lot of African American people in your neighborhood for some reason. Some people have a shortage of African American children in their neighborhood! That has nothing to do with your parents or their mortgage broker!
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| Pledging the flag to conceal their wicked aims. It's what they always do, the swine, especially the first graders. Via Learning for Justice, and some great big explication of what "CRT" in the classroom is actually like (it works extremely hard to not make anybody feel bad, white kids in particular). |
Hi, it's Stupid to say critical race theory is being taught in school classrooms all across the USA. Do you want to get good teachers in trouble? Anyway it's not really critical race theory, and it's certainly not being taught.
But then I ran into somebody smart saying something similar, my tweep Nathan Newman, professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in a post at his substack ("Critical Race Theory IS In Our Schools—And It Needs to Be Defended):
The rightwing legislators seeking to ban “Critical Race Theory” from our classrooms are lying about what CRT teaches about race in our society – but they are not lying that CRT has been influencing how children are being educated.
Some progressives want to pretend that Derrick Bell is some kind of Gnostic learning, taught only to the select in the cloisters of elite law schools, but that does a disservice to the profound impact, Bell, Richard Delgado, Kimberlé Crenshaw and other CRT scholars have had on our culture, including in the field of education and teacher training in particular.
Because it indeed is not the case that there are any grade school teachers imparting this gnarly body of theory to their charges, but there are some who are applying it, or what Newman suggests calling a "critical race pedagogy" (at the moment I like "CRT-informed pedagogy"), in the classroom, and it's a really good thing. Kids don't have to learn CRT, but teachers should learn about it and bring it to the way they do their practical everyday work, as an aid to the way they handle the difficult feelings about race they may encounter in the kindest and most productive possible way: