Thread by @wesyang

When people refer to "whiteness" and "white supremacy", it's alas literally true in some contexts that they mean "literacy", and it's alas distressingly the case that one of those contexts is K-12 education

https://twitter.com/davidrieff/status/1343484768378363905

So "worship of the written word" means something beyond "being able to read", but characterizing what happens in K-12 schools as "worship" surely implies that a primary emphasis on literacy (as opposed to orality) is racist

And no, this is not a half-clever plot by white supremacists to keep minorities down. It is what professional "anti-racist" educators who oppose "white supremacy" in its many guises (including "worship of the written word") earnestly believe.

I’m all for showing due respect to oral tradition. But oral tradition is what flourishes outside of formal institutions without needing the help of those institutions, while inculcating literacy and all that entails is what schools are for.

Schools shouldn’t denigrate non-literate peoples or fail to recognize the wisdom and creativity encoded in those traditions — but neither should they fail to recognize and transmit the mind-expanding virtues of literacy, or reduce those qualities to “whiteness”

These schemata were written in the 1970’s. It’s been a long time since anyone believed or taught kids that like only Pilgrim’s Progress is literature or whatever.