school reopening survey asking about anti-bias/anti-racist programming

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03/23/2021 08:55

Subject: Re:school reopening survey asking about anti-bias/anti-racist programming

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Anonymous

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Anonymous wrote:Here is where she said oversee:

Yeah, and you see this on DCUM a lot. Any point someone wants to make, if someone doesn't agree with you, call them racist. Don't have funds to hire childcare for DL and are at risk of losing your job because overseeing DL? Obviously you're racist because Black people have had worse. Perfection! No one will get annoyed with this tactic! No one will start to question every single social justice policy!

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).

Seriously tell me how the use of “oversee” when used to mean supervise and not in a context about race is racist.

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.

The issue heee is that even if the OP was referring to overseeing the teacher instead of their kids that doesn't mean that they necessarily were conscious of the subtle power dynamic implied by that word choice. It's easier to see in metaphors involving plantations and reservations but our language is chock full of phrases with a sketchy denotation. For instance, "other" actually means second while "beyond the pale" has something to do with Irish people. Bad karma is also regularly used wrongly and can be done in a way that is truly offensive if done wrong. Etymology is fascinating. However there's a fine line between pointing out the underlying inadvertant meaning and imputing intent.