This is top shelf, upper echelon trolling. |
What about if it isn’t? What if someone actually felt that way? |
Can someone please post the original post? I may have been wrong and want to see how the word “oversee” was used and in what context. |
Here is where she said oversee:
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Yeah, “overseeing” distance learning? How is that racist? Seems like an alarmist response to an innocuous post. |
My favorite is that the post is about seeing racism when there isn’t any. So a person saw racism (the use of the word oversee when referring to DL) when there wasn’t any. Like I couldn’t tell if it was a joke. But apparently not. |
If you think this is a joke, you fail to realize how serious the problem of critical race theory is in this country. This person is expressing a view held by most critical race theorists. Quillette.com has published some thoughtful articles by academics and others on this topic. There are also some thoughtful podcasts on youtube.com by John McWhorter (Columbia), Glenn Loury (Brown), Steven Pinker (Harvard) and Heather Heying/Bret Weinstein (Princeton). |
What view? That the word “oversee” is somehow inherently poisonous? |
Seriously tell me how the use of “oversee” when used to mean supervise and not in a context about race is racist. |
This response is just “but critical race theory exists.” This seems a straw man for this situation. |
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Maybe if people read more diverse authors and had a more diverse friend group they wouldn’t be so testy to being called Karen or make comments that got them called Karen.
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Or maybe they wouldn’t call people stereotyping, non-substantive names.... |
For the sake of argument. In this contexr "oversee" could be inplied to mean overseeing the teacher instead of the child. If that is true then there is an underlying power dynamic and relative value judgment being expressed. Since the majority of DC teachers are black there is an inherent racial component to the phrase. This is further exacerbated if an assumption is made that the poster is a Ward 3 parent. While I think this is a stretch and relies on a series of assumptions it is an argument. If one unpacks oversee then one can see the overlaid slavery metaphor. But even in this convoluted reading it mostly represents a power dynamic and not necessarily anything racial. |
Thanks for actually making that argument. It is indeed convoluted, but I appreciate the time spent to explain. I read the quote as the parent overseeing their young children (perhaps because I am supervising — overseeing — my young kids’ DL) which would not have the same overtones, hence my confusion. I do think there’s a whole lotta racist ideas expressed on DCUM, and I’m often surprised by people’s willingness to express these ideas plainly. I do also think there are people here interested in just hurting others, and one way they do that is accuse them of any number of things (being bad parents, being mentally ill, not having good spouses, and being racist). Certainly sometimes the racism accusation is warranted, but other times it seems employed unreasonably. |
I hear you but there is more to it than you might think. McWhorter has a Ph.D. in linguists from Stanford and is a professor of English. He talks a lot about the use and abuse of language in critical race theory, including the type used by the pp. So do Heying/Weinstein. If you get a chance to watch or read some of their material, I would be interested to hear your thoughts. It does take an investment of some time which is a drag. |