All I ever wanted was to pick apart the day and put the peices back together my way.
Don't read this if you're not in the mood for a diatribe.
Through out our entire schooling careers, we are perpetually forced to read various literary selections about slavery, racism and the oppression of black peple. Fine. Great. But, beneath the veneer of our society's seemingly "reformed" attitude towards Africa/Africans/African Americans, lays the very same bigotry and silent condescendance that leads to slavery, racism and oppression in the first place. Roughly estimated, I'd say that about 75% of the works we are fed are written by white people. There are some exceptions; Non-honors courses read Zora Neal Hurston and Frederick Douglass. But why don't we read these authors in Advanced Placement courses? For some reason, college prep seems to embrace these significantly more diverse titles, while AP classes plow lugubriously through Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Harper Lee's , and the like? And don't try and argue that Lee feels the minority quota because she's a female; everybody knows Truman Capote wrote the majority of Mockingbird and gave Lee the credit.
Moreover, even if I have miscalculated and we do read an equal amount of white and black authors, what purpose does the hum-drum redundancy of the what are essentially third person slave narratives serve after we've read already read it in 15 other forms in various English and History classes for the past 4, if not 6, years?
By what means does our school systme wish to expand our minds, to enhance our very usefullness, for lack of a real word, in the world if we are beaten to a slow and figurative death with juiceless novels while simultainuosly BLIND TO WHAT IS GOING ON IN THE REAL WORLD.
Genocide in Africa did not stop with the Emancipation Proclamation, for goodness sake. Martin Luther King Jr. didn't put an end to racism in America. The South is not the only placed where blacks were oppressed.
Do you know what we're reading in school? We're reading silencing mechanisms. We're scarfing our slice of the Peace of Mind Pie that is so voraciously devoured by the Bay Area Liberal, and we're being served second and third and fourth helpings.
Why on earth do we need to know what happened hundreds of years ago on a boat if no so-called "educator" is going to take one day out of their cookie cutter lesson plan to teach his students what is going on right now?
What value is attributed to so called "tolerance" and "acceptance" and "equality" when we sit upon our Whole Foods asses while the very offspring of the charactors that only exists to us in textbooks starve?
How are the diluted facts that make millionaires in Hollywood from movies like Hotel Rawonda and The Last King of Scotland so conviently easily ignored in Economics class? There they are, the directors in California, making a killing while other people get killed.
I'm not saying that I have the knowledge, influence or power to change the system completely or even make it better, but I want to seek out the truth and attempt to expose and utilize it as much as I can. Its a potent thing. Its wildly ignored but its a potent thing.
Through out our entire schooling careers, we are perpetually forced to read various literary selections about slavery, racism and the oppression of black peple. Fine. Great. But, beneath the veneer of our society's seemingly "reformed" attitude towards Africa/Africans/African Americans, lays the very same bigotry and silent condescendance that leads to slavery, racism and oppression in the first place. Roughly estimated, I'd say that about 75% of the works we are fed are written by white people. There are some exceptions; Non-honors courses read Zora Neal Hurston and Frederick Douglass. But why don't we read these authors in Advanced Placement courses? For some reason, college prep seems to embrace these significantly more diverse titles, while AP classes plow lugubriously through Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Harper Lee's , and the like? And don't try and argue that Lee feels the minority quota because she's a female; everybody knows Truman Capote wrote the majority of Mockingbird and gave Lee the credit.
Moreover, even if I have miscalculated and we do read an equal amount of white and black authors, what purpose does the hum-drum redundancy of the what are essentially third person slave narratives serve after we've read already read it in 15 other forms in various English and History classes for the past 4, if not 6, years?
By what means does our school systme wish to expand our minds, to enhance our very usefullness, for lack of a real word, in the world if we are beaten to a slow and figurative death with juiceless novels while simultainuosly BLIND TO WHAT IS GOING ON IN THE REAL WORLD.
Genocide in Africa did not stop with the Emancipation Proclamation, for goodness sake. Martin Luther King Jr. didn't put an end to racism in America. The South is not the only placed where blacks were oppressed.
Do you know what we're reading in school? We're reading silencing mechanisms. We're scarfing our slice of the Peace of Mind Pie that is so voraciously devoured by the Bay Area Liberal, and we're being served second and third and fourth helpings.
Why on earth do we need to know what happened hundreds of years ago on a boat if no so-called "educator" is going to take one day out of their cookie cutter lesson plan to teach his students what is going on right now?
What value is attributed to so called "tolerance" and "acceptance" and "equality" when we sit upon our Whole Foods asses while the very offspring of the charactors that only exists to us in textbooks starve?
How are the diluted facts that make millionaires in Hollywood from movies like Hotel Rawonda and The Last King of Scotland so conviently easily ignored in Economics class? There they are, the directors in California, making a killing while other people get killed.
I'm not saying that I have the knowledge, influence or power to change the system completely or even make it better, but I want to seek out the truth and attempt to expose and utilize it as much as I can. Its a potent thing. Its wildly ignored but its a potent thing.