1/6 Cowards swim in the sea of intentional ignorance and ingest the water willfully. They are the “anti-intellectuals’ they claim others to be. And they reveal themselves when the racist structures they build and maintain crack and crumble.
2/6 The cowardly and racist reporting by the WSJ targeting @DisruptTexts and several thoughtful educators is shameful but not surprising.
3/6 Intentional ignorance is to claim that children are harmed if they do NOT read classic texts and to name them as ‘foundational’ without acknowledging how white supremacy is the cause for believing them to be ‘foundational’ in the first place.
4/6 Intentional ignorance is to determine that ‘better-educated’ happens by reading the classics and by refusal to recognize the white supremacy inherent in that as well as the difference between well-schooled and well-educated.
5/6 Intentional ignorance is characterizing the scholarship of the BIWOC of #DisruptTexts as a ‘campaign’ rather than the movement tens of thousands of educators know it to be.
6/6 Dr. Bernice King says her father defined a revolution as changing people and systems. And #DisruptTexts is in fact a revolution. Changing educational and publishing systems that benefit ALL children. And regardless of the efforts of cowards the revolution continues.
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It’s THAT time of year. Dr. King’s birthday and the federal holiday celebrating him and his work is fast approaching. And here’s my annual rant.
Teachers, STOP misleading students by only reading the last pages of Dr. King’s most famous speech.
Too many students are led to believe IN SCHOOL that this speech begins this way. STOP teaching a whitewashed, filtered down version of this man, his politics, and the realities of racism because you’re more comfortable with the idealism you see in the last three pages.