NYC teachers union passes "Black Lives Matter at School" resolution calling for, among many other things, "disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family."
The disruption of course happened long ago.
Calling it an act of liberation from Western oppression is what's (relatively) new.
Stating that collective care should happen "to the extent that mothers, parents and children are comfortable" is a curious touch.
The recently introduced framework for the "Culturally Sustaining-Responsive Education" that the resolution affirms seeks a transformation of the way students are taught with a heavy emphasis on "power and privilege," and "decentering dominant ideologies" nysed.gov/common/nysed/f…
It's really not just "It Takes a Village" or other things that sound familiar to you, but I get why one want to make it so.
The CSRE framework is so abstract and jargon-ridden that it's hard to say what it actually means in practice. A strong suspicion of traditional modes of evaluation (grades, tests) and deference toward "other ways of knowing" pervades the whole document.
In practice, you can see writing hip-hop lyrics as a way to get an A in English, for instance. (If grades are given at all.) But there will also be explicit lessons in power and privilege and oppression.
It's hard not seeing these very abstract directives being turned in practice by workaday public school teachers into extremely rigid and dogmatic exercises in repeating political slogans
Such as this page of "white culture" that appeared on the website of the National African American History Museum until being replaced this summer after attracting online controversy:
btw that page of "white culture" was subsequently replaced by a page on "whiteness" linked here: nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-…
Orlando Patterson on the myth of the hood and the reality of black social isolation
Patterson is not the be all and end all on the subject, but he is a careful empirical practitioner who backs up all his conclusions with extensive and rigorous survey data
The "Cosby as symbol of American fatherhood" and where it eventually went has really not been fully processed
One thing it does is seem to confirm what MacKinnonite feminists regard as the true face of patriarchy
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