From Pine View Farm

White Privilege Means Not Having To Hear about White Privilege 0

Part of being privileged is not having to hear about being privileged, because your being privileged is, well, it just is.

It’s being able to get a popular, effective, and challenging teacher reassigned because you don’t like the lesson.

Students study speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and invite local community leaders to speak in the class. They are prompted to talk honestly about racism, class disparity, and privilege in their day-to-day lives at the start of every session. Assignments include analyzing “the way media and society fetishize both women and people of color.”

But the provocative discussions that Meyer found so revelatory abruptly ended a few months ago when a female white student accused the teacher of creating an “intimidating educational environment.”

Here’s a bit from another report, this one from one of the teacher’s former students.

Greenberg was hesitant to speak on the record, but he would tell me that he’s never gotten a parent complaint before this year, and he feels that the finding by the district was based on limited evidence—evidence he hasn’t seen. That he was ordered to immediately halt his curriculum “assumes that the materials are objectionable until proven otherwise,” he says, and he’s upset that a single family would have the ability to shut down classroom work so swiftly and entirely, without input from any other students or families.

There is another, larger story here that I don’t feel qualified to tackle. The established press doesn’t seem to have noticed this story of censorship.

I learned about it by listening to amTWib.

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