Thread by @obaidomer

Angry, probably incoherent, rant incoming.
This is insane. This is a workshop to dismantle white supremacy culture in schools. Just look at some of the things they consider white supremacy culture.
culturallyresponsiveleadership.com/category/white…

I want to focus on a few of these "symptoms of white supremacy culture."
Individualism, Objectivity, Worship of the written word.

This is an attack on the Enlightenment. The written word is what advanced humanity, from the first scratches to count livestock or harvest to Sumerian Cuneiform and Egyptian Hieroglyphics. Writing developed independently in the Indus valley and the Yellow River valley in China.

Advancements in the preservation of knowledge lead to the growth of knowledge. You were no longer limited to the little you could remember and pass on. Ideas became permanent. Without papyrus then paper then books and moveable type to the 1s and 0s you are reading now

we would still be staring at shadows in a cave. Thanks to the written word many people will know that reference and those that don't can look it up. Why would you want to get rid of the written word? It is worthy of much respect.

Objectivity? This is the core of the Enlightenment and the traditions that lead up to it. To call this white supremacist culture is wrong. The ENlightenment would not have happened if it were not for pockets of enlightenment throughout human history, each building off earlier

ones. Refine the thoughts and removing those that ran counter to its ethos.
India has a tradition of Aristotelian, Platonic, and Stoic thought that goes back over 2000 years.
historyofphilosophy.net/india-greece

During the Islamic Golden age greek though was kept alive in Baghdad and refined by Arabs, North Africans, Persians, Indians, Chinese. From Baghdad, it ended up in Europe and lead to the Enlightenment.

100 years before the European Enlightenment, a man named Yacob sat alone in a cave in Ethiopia and wrote down thoughts very similar to Locke, Kant, and Hume.
aeon.co/essays/yacob-a…

The Enlightenment reintroduced Objectivity to us. Either through discourse or by following the scientific method the Enlightenment was and is a tool-kit/methodology of reaching an objective truth that approximates reality.

I would be leery of anyone wanting to remove objectivity in schools. It is a bigger problem than you may think.
Read this thread.

https://twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/1278865200817438721

Individualism. Again this is an attack on the Enlightenment. Liberal thinking is about the rights and responsibilities of the individual. By making the individual freer you get a more just and freer society.

In 1978 Audre Lorde wrote a paper; The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House.
She was talking about capitalism but it has grown to take include science, reason, and logic.
collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/upl…

To call these the master's tools is to deny the history of humanity. They are ours to take and if we are foolish enough, give away.
We've had calls to #shutdownstem and for decolonisation of science.

There are demands to get rid of classics departments because they are too white. I never see a solution only a call to destroy. Why not go to India and research the classical though that was going on there and share it with the world?

This way of thinking that there are ways of thinking according to the colour of your skin is racism. Why would you deny yourself and others the very tools that have helped lift humanity up?

This was a thread I did on the ridiculous idea of white ways of knowing. No one colour of skin owns knowledge don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

https://twitter.com/obaidomer/status/1231789436859506688