RaineBeausoleil

While watching Precious Knowledge I found myself getting angry for the kids and teachers in this situation. To see and hear the ignorance they faced from people who wouldn’t even go into their classrooms but decided they could talk about what was happening and that they knew better. Especially as we have the facts, we know these programs help students. While watching this I think it highlights our need to stay learning even as educators. We should always look for how to improve our student's chances in the world, and how to push back against this hatred they’ll most likey face. “They never mentioned Whites (other than Southerners) as perpetrators or beneficiaries of racism and 80 percent believed that Blacks had achieved equal rights today.” Lewis (2001) found several White parents she interviewed to believe that talking about race would be divisive, even in the context of Black History Month, and to dismiss ethnic diversity with statements such as “We should all be Americans.”’ ...

While I was doing the reading and videos on the four I’s of oppression it brought some ideas I didn't know much about to my attention. I've done a lot of learning about oppression and how it works before but these I’s help break it down into easier categories. Starting with Ideological oppression, as the video starts Ideological oppression is rooted in the idea of how someone should be based on their identity, along with the privileged identity being better than them. Currently, I think we’ve been hearing this kind of oppression of immigrants in the media. Lately, I’ve been hearing about immigrants being violent, lazy, and job-stealers as if that’s an inherent quality that comes with being an immigrant especially if they’re from a Spanish-speaking/non-white country. Which I believe also ties in with intersectionality since they wouldn’t be facing this specific kind of oppression if not for both race and immigration status. Internalized oppression is when someone feels less th...

One of the points I want to talk about is white people only listening to other white people on terms of race. I feel like when we talk about it a lot of white people don't listen to people of color, who have the most experience with these issues. Or they only talk to the people who agree with them. Personally I think it's important to talk to people of color who have those opposing viewpoints. Especially when it comes to teaching their children. It can also help us be aware of the power we hold over students. Not only as a teacher but as a white person in society. We know whiteness is vauled in our society, this applies to the classroom too. Tying in with S.W.A.A.M.P and Johnson. We need to acknowledge the difference in order to be fair to our students. If we want students to succeed we should be talking about the challenges they face. Including ones of having less social power than others, and helping them build the tools they need to succeed. As well as helping change this po...

On page 2 Johnson states that his book can't help having a "white, straight, male, middle-class point of view" (Johnson 2) as that was how he was born. I believe that's the same for all of us. Our experiences are oftentimes shaped by what we were born as, although it shouldn't be this way. Unlike him, I have an assigned female at birth, queer, lower-class point of view. But I'll always have a white one. Going on from that I would like to talk about the fear of the unfamiliar. As Johnson says "For many, the answer is some variation on "human nature, People can't help fearing the unfamiliar-including people of other races, goes one popular argument. Or women and men are so dissimilar it's as though they come from separate planets, and it's some kind of cross-cultural (if not cross-species) miracle that we get along as well as we do. Or there is only one natural sexual orientation (heterosexual), and all the rest are therefore unacceptable a...