| | | It that example is too shallow for you, you're not wiling to hear what someone who clearly knows is saying.
He developed his perspective based on how his school managed the lunch line, not anything that was taught in history or any other class. His issue is that the kids who were part of the school lunch program were last in line. Note that the school lunch program is a poverty program, not race based. He was at the back of the line because his family was poor, not because they were Black. His feelings run deep but he is not thinking critically. As I've said often before (in the context of your judgment of the FBI's treatment of Trump's campaign), if you start out in the wrong direction, whatever ensues in your thinking is off.
Do I think of him as less qualified or less desirable because he is black?
Because you don't understand the nature of CRT, you continue to conflate personal racism and structural racism. Judging a potential oral surgeon as less qualified just for being Black would the personal kind of racism--a distaste for or prejudice against Black people. Structural racism is about laws and institutions over history and how they have disadvantaged Blacks. They are quite different concepts. Personal racism is a visceral thing. CRT is academic and objective. It is analysis of the intersection of race and laws/institutions. Structural racism is the product of an academic exercise. Nothing inherently visceral about it. One may not be a flaming personal racist yet still refuse to recognize structural racism.
You also conflate then and now and forget that we're talking about history class. History class is about what happened in the past. Based on his appearance of age, that the speaker was able to succeed happened in the recent past, which was a better time for Blacks than it had been before. That his family was so poor he needed meal tickets as a kid may have stemmed at least in part from structural racism in his grandfather's time of his father's time. He looks to be of an age where his opportunities would have benefited from the civil rights movement, which was an excellent thing as far as it went. Good for him. But nothing to do with covering structural racism in history class.
There's absolutely no place for personal racism in public schools (or anyplace else for that matter). Structural racism in history class is something else again. |
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