Reply to College that won't inundate my kids with white guilt?

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "College that won't inundate my kids with white guilt?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]At the the same time, I don't want my children to be indoctrinated into the current white-christian-men-are-to-blame-for-EVERYTHING culture that is so rampant on many school campuses.[/quote]

It's been some time since I went to college.  I don't know what you're talking about.  Could you elaborate?  If you know this is happening, why don't you know on which campuses it's happening too?    [/quote]

It actually begins before college. My son is in high school and just came home with a paper on white privilege/white guilt. The paper states that if he and his family drive to the grocery store without being pulled over or "targeted" by police, he should chalk that up to the fact that he is white and should have white guilt over it because a minority would not be as fortunate and must fear this every time they go to the store. There were many more examples on the paper of how he is sooo privileged in everyday little things because he is white, should feel guilty about it, and he should understand how white privilege has given his family everything they have.

[/quote]

I bet you've twisted that paper and it's actually about teaching empathy, not guilt.  Does it actually specify feeling guilty?  I doubt it.  But prove me wrong - quote it.[/quote]

I'm sorry but my kid is Latino at BASIS DC (majority AA) and had a white English teacher who basically assigned them an essay where they needed to conclude that the American Dream (of coming from nothing and rising to everything) is basically dead because of racism.  This in a school founded by an (albeit white) equal opportunity person who concluded that education is the ticket out of anywhere.  Of course he is not on a mission to educate poor minority kids, he started in AZ where there are not very many AA folks, but he did found a school here, where lottery admissions mean there are a fair number of them.

Anyway, a lot of the parents were beyond pissed.  And maybe we only got away with it because we are not white, but to tell inner city kids who are trying to use education as a ticket out and trying hard (still at BASIS DC in 7th grade) that they have no chance because the American Dream is dead when my husband and my grandfather are both examples of it was ridiculous.  When there ain't enough white kids to sell that shit to to them, some of the rest of us fight back.

PS I went to Princeton in the early 90s and found a fairly active conservative community, whom I debated all the time.  I think we still have Peter Singer there, although he came after my time.  I went to UVA Law School and became much more conservative if you can call it that (think Federalist Society) than I ever could have possibly imagined.

In both institutions, we had professors who identified themselves as "liberal" or "conservative" and others whose course assignments let us figure it out for ourselves.

But I will never forget the course I took by Cornell West or the seminar I was in taught by Maya Angelou.  The one thing Princeton really taught me was that I had to respect other points of view and if I could not address them on equally educated intellectual terms, I was done for.

But Princeton was also the most diverse community I have ever been in - internationally, economically, ethnically, racially, sexually, you name it.  I learned a hell of a lot by making friends from East LA and Ghana, and realizing that some people came to Princeton intellectually and socially unprepared and needed a 9th semester of financial aid because so many of them had to leave either because they had to deal with family issues or because they had trouble dealing with Princeton.  I also had a friend in the reserves who was pulled out for the Gulf War.

I studied the "internalization" of institutional racism/discrimination/superiority complexes and the "symbolization of subordinaton"  but wrote my thesis in Anthropology about an indigenous group in a foreign country who called their own shots and risked their lives for it, and refused to integrate themselves into the dominant culture, and got an A from two advisors who were at opposite ends of the political spectrum.

I vote for Princeton.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics