estebanana -> RE: Banned Books Week: September 24-30, 2017 (Sep. 25 2017 6:29:23)
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I've worked at a few colleges, teaching and as staff, first rule regarding students, don't get involved with children's games. College students of some stripes are just aching to challenge authority, usually the best thing to do is ride it out and remove the ones who are a threat to public safety. Evergreen may not have been very good at that. But you also have to understand the Northwest of the US, it's mostly WHITE. The Northwest is is learning new things about itself. I had a former professor who retired from Evergreen about ten years ago, it was always mellow then. Just chock full of white silly liberal studies kids. See here's the thing reading James Baldwin in predominantly white school is cool, because here we are liberal arts majors getting down with James Baldwin, or Langston Hughes, or Zora Neale Hurston, or Imiri Baraka...et al, it's cool that we know about Coltrane and grew up listening to rap. But add Black kids and the new awakenings and you might be asked to read bell hooks, and you might not like it, you might find yourself in all kinds of post colonial issued conversations you might think are not important. But the students set the tenor or the flavor of the curriculum and in the NW it's not always been about Black authors or art or politics. And you have school that is attracting students who are outspoken, and frankly it's hard to deal with as faculty. However it is a 'for real' a game changer when there are more outspoken Black kids on campus at a small school. Personally I would find it refreshing, and not much different than schools I attended- but there is going to be rough trade and Evergreen is not the first or last. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is one of our esteemed Supreme Court justices, she was asked several years ago if she thought the court should be seated with more women to make it equal. She said, I think the court should have nine women justices. The interviewer was taken aback and said, but that sounds unfair to have a gender inequality on the court, and she wryly answered, the interviewer had stepped right into it. She said no, in my opinion nine women justices would be fair, as previous to Ronald Regan appointing the first woman to the court, Sandra Day O'Connor, nine men sat the court for 250 years. ( Her quip implies more about power inequality than something that will literally happen anytime soon, but it's a perspective that shifts well into racial discussions of power, but then you're French so you had, Ahem, your share of post war philosophers who studied and presented power structure critique. Who am I to tell you? ) Mary Wollstonecraft also said 250 years ago: 'Women seek equality with men, not dominance over men.' So right from the beginning there's an ideal and there's path. No person looking forward has ever said the path will be smoothly paved. What my complaint with the biology teacher boils down to is that in order to be moving forward, sometimes YOU have to clear the underbrush for the rest of the party, a space has to be made for women and POC in the world. And sure there may be some or a few, women and POC claiming a space and they may wrankle the way you see things, but in a bigger picture from my point of view carving out that space with them is more important.
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