(Heavy sigh) All I can say is, brace yourself.
In a way it's grimly hilarious, although the fact that it involves real people emphasizes the "grim" part. A classroom full of mostly white kids drive their black teacher out of a job for not tap-dancing fast enough. Because antiracism. Gotta keep mouthing the words.
But there's a lesson here. If you're in education you need to identify students with the potential to be like Keisha from this article. Deal with them however you need to, but deal with them. Because if you leave your authority up for grabs, the worst possible people will grab it.
2 comments:
I'd heard of Telluride but I had no idea what they were about so I looked the place up and found their newsletter announcing the seminars planned for 2022. I'm a little surprised the professor didn't read it before signing on to teach his course as he might have got a hint things had changed: More importantly, the murder of George Floyd and subsequent growth of the Black Lives Matter movement amplified longstanding concerns within the Association, and particularly among the Association’s Black members, about how our summer programs (and the Association more generally) reinforce and perpetuate white supremacy and anti-Black racism.
We have seen this before in the French Revolution, Russian Communism under Stalin, never mind Chairman Mao's version and the original Nazis of ww2. Every time the purges were a means to consolidate power, eliminate dissent, and solidify the authority of the ruling regime. The problem for us is that more often than not purges are only the beginning for totalitarians.
Wokeism is definitely a cult that has very dangerous precedents. As we used to say: 'If your only tool is a hammer everything looks like a nail.. which works until you run out of nails.'
I don't know if he had a previous contact at Telluride. He doesn't say, but it's conceivable. What's weird is that the page you both link to and quote? It's gone. In fact I'd be hard pressed at present to find any tendentious material on the site. I don't know if this means they've reconsidered their approach or if they're just hiding the parts of their agenda that the public might find distasteful. Either could be a response to a sudden inrush of bad publicity.
You're very right that the French Revolution established the pattern. Eventually both Robespierre and St. Just would die on the guillotines. The big problem is that by that time a lot of innocent people had been killed and/or dispossessed. The other big problem is that the constant air of threat kept people silent about the very thing causing it. And every time since there have been those who've gone along out of fear, self-interest, or pettiness. Or a mix of all three.
If all you have is a hammer it seems to be a temptation to always be hitting people over the head with it. They have inexplicable ideas about what's productive.
Post a Comment