Reply to This American Life about desegregation in schools

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Here is a thought exercise.  For the last couple of posts.  If you said I am a white person instead of an AA the whole forum would be up in arms about racist this racist that.  
Such bs and double standards.

[/quote]

No, it's about experience.  I don't try to comment on the experience of having a penis, PP, because I don't have one.  Same goes for this.[/quote]

+1. It's possible to have a conversation about race, even about racism, that doesn't turn mean and accusatory, but you have to make sure to do a couple of things very deliberately and carefully. The bottom line is, speak from your own experience. Don't try to project your experience onto other people's experience, and don't try to claim experience you don't have. I send my white daughter to a Title 1 school in our neighborhood, so I can claim and speak credibly about the experience of being a white parent at a majority minority school, but I cannot claim or speak credibly about the experiences of my child's low income minority classmates or their parents. There are other people on this thread who can speak to those experiences credibly, because they've been those kids. Me, I was a poor white kid in a poor white school district, but I still recognize that my experience of poverty is objectively different than the experiences my daughter's friends have. Urban vs. rural. 2015 vs. 1990. Black vs. white. There are some experiences of poverty and low expectations that are going to be fairly universal, like the stigma of never having clean clothing or getting crappy school lunch when everyone else brought nice stuff from home, but there are some things that are never going to translate. Most of all? No one ever assumed that I was poor because my parents were lazy or didn't care about education. When white people are poor, people generally assume that they fell on hard times, had some kind of expensive emergency, or whatever. When black people are poor, people are very quick to assume that they did or did not do something to create the situation and that they can just as easily do or not do something in order to resolve the situation. Those assumptions are based in white privilege.[/quote]

Thank you....and in total agreement.[/quote]

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