#antiracism workshops

[thenookienostradamus]

Y’all. Y’all. Please read this article. If you’ve ever felt alienated by a writing workshop or class, this might tell you why. Decolonizing the writing workshop—for real. 😮

[joyhouse]

Can you believe it’s The Wong Side of Life’s 10th birthday. Here are some of our memories from performing on stage, to meeting Magda Szubanski, Alice Pung & baby Leah. We hope to continue in 2023 with our “Kindness is for free” kids’ workshops once a month or so in schools #kids #workshops #antibullying #antiracism https://www.instagram.com/p/Cmxum1Yv2hk/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Zack K. De Piero

Published: Jun 29, 2023

A so-called antiracist work environment was, actually, a hostile work environment

I’m a white writing professor, and apparently, that’s a problem. That was the unmistakable message sent to me at Penn State University – and that’s why I’m suing them.

In November 2020 – nearly half a year after George Floyd’s murder – I was subjected to a “White Teachers Are a Problem” video for a monthly professional development meeting for writing faculty. Its featured speaker, Asao Inoue, is a self-described antiracist practitioner. Not an obscure one, either: About a year prior, Inoue gave the Chair’s Address at a prestigious writing studies research conference – the same field in which I earned my Ph.D. – where he declared, “White people can perpetuate White supremacy by being present [...] Your body perpetuates racism.”

At the heart of Inoue’s appalling comments is the baseless attribution of negative characteristics to a particular race. Inside radical academic bubbles, that might be applauded; in the real world, that’s called discrimination. And it’s illegal. When discrimination enters the workplace, depending on its frequency and intensity, citizens can file a hostile work environment lawsuit against their employer.

At my Abington campus, my direct supervisor pushed an aggressive “antiracism” campaign through private emails and monthly meetings. She laid the groundwork by echoing a colleague’s stance that “reverse racism isn’t racism,” thereby abandoning cherished human rights principles. “[R]acist structures are quite real in assessment and elsewhere regardless of [anybody’s] good intentions,” she claimed. “Racism is in the results if the results draw a color line.” Later, citing a “Black Linguistic Justice!” resolution from an increasingly politicized research organization, my supervisor issued two directives: “assure that black students can find success in our classrooms” and “assure that all students see that white supremacy manifests itself in language and in writing pedagogy.” 

Translation: the English language is racist, teaching writing is racist, and grading black students by consistent standards is racist.

Tough spot if you’re a white writing instructor and one of your black students doesn’t submit a big paper. Even tougher if you work at a “majority minority” campus: out of 20 undergraduate campuses across the Penn State system, to its credit, Abington is the only with a majority of minority students. But the toughest position goes to every black student in this environment – an educator seems to believe they’re incapable of achieving academic success on their own merit.

Misguided as my supervisor was, she wasn’t just one rogue professor in the bunch. Antiracism fever ran rampant through the school’s institutional culture. To commemorate Juneteenth 2020, Abington’s DEI director told us to “Stop being afraid of your own internalized white supremacy” and to “Hold other white people accountable.” That same week, amidst faculty panic over a masked-up return to campus, one colleague invoked “history and white male privilege” to forecast, without discernible evidence, “One can already see a mile away that there will be some who resist wearing masks, etc. Such resistance is also more likely to be led by white males and in classrooms taught by women and people of color.”

In September 2021, I complied with my state-mandated duty to report bias of these (and other) incidents.  The Penn State Affirmative Action Office summoned me into a Zoom meeting where its associate director informed me, “There is a problem with the White race” then directed me to continue attending antiracist workshops “until you get it.”

The next antiracist workshop was titled, "The Myth of the Colorblind Writing Classroom: White Instructors Confront White Privilege in Their Classrooms." During this meeting, my supervisor provided a quote: "Without attending to issues of inequity and particularly the role race [plays] in constructing social inequities, we remain unaware of and thereby unwittingly reproduce racist discourses and practices in our classrooms.” As the target audience for this message, I sensed that I’d soon get accused of racism for holding my students to reasonable (and necessary) standards – I could feel my $53,000/year, non-tenured and non-unionized job hanging in the balance. So, I asked for examples of how I could bring equity into my classroom and what this actually looked like in practice.

Rather than help me to “get it,” the Affirmative Action Office deemed my questions to be evidence of bullying and harassment. Yet, my supervisor’s years-long actions were “in line with the Campus Strategic Plan.” Human Resources asked me to sign a performance reprimand, then Penn State inserted those charges into my annual performance review.

Now I’m fighting back. With a Right-to-Sue letter from the Department of Justice, it’s time for Penn State to account for real racial discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. I’ve got the support of Allen Harris Law and a nonpartisan civil rights group, the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism.

“Antiracism” isn’t quite the right term to describe the performative activism that’s happening across academia and corporate America. Let’s call this hustle what it is: plain and simple, racism. And just like racism, the so-called antiracist movement threatens everything in its path: freedom of speech, due process, healthy workplace relationships, professional excellence, academic rigor, and the psychological welfare of teachers and students alike.

Zack De Piero was employed by Penn State University - Abington College as an assistant teaching professor of English and composition from 2018-2022. He has a Ph.D. in education from the University of California Santa Barbara, where he studied the teaching and learning of postsecondary writing. His personal views in this piece do not reflect those of his current employer, Northampton Community College.

Zack De Piero, PhD began working at Pennsylvania State University in August of 2018 as an English writing professor at the Abington campus. 

Almost immediately upon the outset of his employment, Professor De Piero noticed a race-essentialism focus, which he feared would be harmful to his students, a majority of which were from minority backgrounds and ethnicities. 

Professor De Piero was required to attend professional development meetings to view videos such as “White Teachers Are a Problem”, and was directed to “assure that all students see that white supremacy manifests itself in language and in writing pedagogy.”  Incidents like these made it clear that Penn State harbored a bias against him based on his skin color. So he took the prescribed course of action and filed a bias report.  The Penn State Affirmative Action Office quickly called Professor De Piero into a Zoom meeting where its Associate Director informed him that, “There is a problem with the White race” then directed him to continue attending antiracist workshops “until you get it.” 

It became impossible for Professor De Piero to effectively perform his job duties. In August 2021, he was forced to leave a job he had prized and students he cared for deeply. 

Professor De Piero has now filed suit against Penn State in federal court, alleging violations of his civil rights under federal and Pennsylvania law. 

Professor De Piero is represented by FAIR Network Attorneys Michael Allen and Samantha Harris of Allen Harris Law.

==

It's a cult.

The only thing that will turn around this insanity is suing the crap out of them.

[skinnerhousebooks]

Check out these workshops related to Skinner House titles at this year’s General Assembly: 

The Rough Side of the Mountain, edited by Rev. Qiyamah A. Rahman and Incantations for Rest by Atena O. Danner, among others—workshop: Interrogating the Gaze of Unitarian Universalist Women Writers

The Darkness Divine by Rev. Kristen L. Harper—workshop: Next Steps into Antiracism and Reparations 

Held by Rev. Barbara F. Meyers—workshop: Mental Health Peer Support in Congregations 

A Fire at the Center by Rev. Karen Van Fossan—workshop: Colonialism: Religious Vision, Pursuit of Profit, or Both

[gothicprep]

random thought dump related to nikki haley saying in her cpac speech that "wokeness is worse than any pandemic", and the similar-ish comment from mike pompeo about "wokeness is worse than the chinese communist party".

it's this common line structure republican politicians have been workshopping that goes something like, "you know that thing you think is bad? wokeness is worse than that!" there's obviously a bit of a trajectory with these sorts of things. in the aughts, being a liberal was bad. some time after, being a social justice warrior was bad. now being. um. a woke? that's what's bad now. but i think what's different about the latter two moments is that there's a question about what wokeness even is.

at least with the neologism of cancel culture, it's understood that this refers to a type of social behavior. is this thing they're calling "woke" a political philosophy, or is it a social behavior? both? to what extent of which? if aliens landed on the planet tomorrow and asked me, for some reason, what "woke" was, i'd really have to think about it.

words are coined, they bounce around, their meanings shift. from my understanding, the origin of the word was black american slang that basically meant that your eyes were open to the true nature of the world. depending on who said this, there could be something of a conspiratorial element they're winking at, or it meant cognizant of social issues. staying woke meant that you weren't just a self-interested person going about your business, but that you were paying attention. this is still a layer of this to the term, but as antiracism became more of a matter of concern in progressive spaces, moderate libs kind of gestured to sjw/woke as ways of separating themselves from people who were further left than they were. it then bled into conservative circles, wherein the meaning became more imprecise because conservatives are... conservative. they view a lot of things as too far left, which has a pretty distinct subtext than left leaning moderates concluding that a small handful of things are too far left.

i think what this is trying to speak to is how there's a new set of ideological concepts around race and gender issues afoot on the left that are pretty different from those which we'd seen 15-20 odd years ago, but the proponents of these ideas haven't settled on a name for themselves. this is unusual. if someone tells me "i'm a liberal, especially on economic issues," i have a sense without asking a lot of detailed questions what that person believes. if they say "i'm a socialist," i understand that this person has a different set of economic beliefs. there's a distinguished intellectual tradition of what socialism is, debates within that sphere about what socialism ought to amount to, and there have been political parties. what i think the conservatives are glomming onto here is something else distinct from how they understand liberalism or socialism, but a movement that doesn't name itself, so they settle on "sjw" or, later, "woke".

what's in a name? clarity, i guess. when conservatives would attack obamacare and call it socialism, liberals could say "no, this isn't socialism" and socialists could say "no, this isn't socialism" because socialism exists – not as an intellectual tendency on its own, but as a movement with a name. meanwhile, if you look at some of the DEI materials that cropped up out of the american racial reckoning of 2020, it's obviously something else separate from expected american liberalism, but i don't know what the shorthand is for that.

a final note on haley: what's interesting is haley's comment at cpac, after which she pivots to "democrats want you to think this is a racist country, but i was the governor of south calorina and i can tell you that this it's not". like, nikki. you underperformed in your first governor's run. 2010 was a wave year for republicans, and south carolina is a very conservative state. she did somewhat terribly, given that. why? i'd wager it may have been... racism?

what's also odd about this is that i can't imagine the... political incentive to treat outside threats (pandemics, the chinese communist party) as lesser to perceived domestic threats. bush 43 was... you know... but i can't imagine him saying anything like "the tax and spend liberals are worse than al-quaeda".

well, that's the thought dump. questions? comments? armchair speculations about the political strategy here? all are welcome.

[teaspoon-of-salt]

ik the homestuck antiracism workshop is a meme-y phrase but it is also like racist. like it's no less racist than trying to deflect from racism accusations by counting your number of poc acquaintances friends.

[jennbarrigar]

NEW on UNTYING KNOTS

Cultivating racially-just, data-driven organizations

“Antiracism tells us relationship is always going to come before the methodology. In fact, it's required for it.” On this episode of Untying Knots Theo Miller and Erika Bernabi share the foundations of their organization, Equity and Results, and reflections from their related workshop at IARA’s 2022 Truth and Transformation convening. Equity and Results is grounded in the model of Antiracist Results-Based Accountability, coupled with the antiracist organizing principles of the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. Their work strives to support organizations’ efforts in building a culture of accountability to advance racial justice through the use of praxis and intentional data use. In our discussion, Erika and Theo share key insights from their work with institutions throughout the US—including how they actively center the lived experiences of those most impacted at every stage of facilitation and program design. The results that Black, Indigenous, and communities of color need, must always come first, in healing-centered, antiracist, and liberatory spaces designed to shift power.

[haunted-medievalist]

(tw homophobia//continued in tags)

not ya girl having to out herself to Straight™ housemates in the middle of the night to convince them that saying the f-slur is not a good thing to do 🙃

[brooklynwildlife]

do you have a small business or tech firm and have questions about diversity-- I'll offer a free consulting conversation - today only. Race, class, gender, sexual orientation, belief systems .. anth bias, anti racism, anti sexual harassment .. etc People say they don't have the budget - for today you don't need one. People say - the conversation is too difficult, I'll make it easy for you. People say - they don't know where to begin. Let's get it in. Anybody with questions - hit me up. . . . . #diversity #inclusion #workshop #discussion #talk #conversation #antibias #antiracism #decolonize #think #toughtalk #equity #tech #business #consulting https://www.instagram.com/p/CFpszRxF6eF/?igshid=wb8m116fzyc9

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

If you look at American workplaces at the moment I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that antiracism was quite easy. The speed at which diversity training programs mushroomed in the aftermath of the anti-police uprisings of the past summer, along with specialist gurus leading them, could easily lead you to think that antiracism was a set of politics best practiced in the bowels of HR departments. No Black bodies left dying on streets, no police stations to burn, just a stack of Robin D’Angelo books and late afternoon management-led sensitivity training sessions.

US companies currently spend $8 billion annually on diversity training. This is despite multiple studies demonstrating that such training neither increases diversity nor stamps out racism. And yet they continue. They continue precisely because these HR exercises are not about dismantling white supremacy; they are about inoculating companies and universities against lawsuits from people who encounter racism and sexism at work.

[enjambedlife]

9/12/2020 | 12/100 Days Of Productivity

I spent this afternoon in an antiracism workshop that my school put on; I kind of wish we’d spent more time on possibilities for action, but it was still super informative. I also set up my planner for next week; as is typical for this year, I have absolutely nothing going on on the weekends but plenty of zoom meetings during the week.

🎧: Build Me Up Buttercup - The Foundations

[faggotrevenge]

and im not trying to say that i’m some paragon of antiracism who knows better than everyone. i’ve just had the opportunity to learn and process these things in spaces designed for white racial identity development, spaces designed for open discussions about race and privilege, and on my own personal time, as well as facilitated activities to teach and help teens/youth process systematic racism and privilege, and listened to and had the opportunity to engage in workshops with Black anti-racism advocates, teachers, leaders. all these things are privileges ive had due to my participation in spaces dedicated to undoing racism, which have helped me reflect and unpack my role in structural racism! it’s still uncomfortable for me to reflect and accept the way that my actions/inaction contributes to white supremacist systems and the way that i’ve benefitted from them! i still have things to learn and unlearn, process, and reflect on. i still benefit from white privilege and the legacy of white privilege.

 it’s always gonna be uncomfortable and our job as white people is to sit with that discomfort, hold it, and allow it to move us forward to do everything in our power to dismantle these systems. and at this point, there is no excuse. read theory, read Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Fanon, Dubois, read the manifestos of anti-racism groups, read books about white supremacy and white privilege. examine your actions, your thoughts, your knee-jerk reactions to things, and especially your choices on how you engage or disengage with discourse around race. One of the things that helped me a lot is racial identity development work, here is a pdf with some information. listen to and uplift BIPOC voices, but also process your guilt and discomfort on your own time or with other white people. do your own labor. don’t wait for BIPOC to call you out or correct you, examine yourself. 

i’m aware this is a my chemical romance tumblr account but i have more of a platform here than i do on my main, and i think that antiracism and racial awareness and white privilege in this (like, band tumblr) and other online communities is overwhelmingly based in forming justifications for yourself rather than doing the work. okay thanks.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Tabia Lee

Published: Mar 31, 2023

This month, I was fired from my position as faculty director for the Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education at De Anza Community College in Cupertino, Calif.—a position I had held for two years. This wasn’t an unexpected development. From the beginning, my colleagues and supervisors had made clear their opposition to the approach I brought to the job. Although I was able to advance some positive initiatives, I did so in the face of constant obstruction.

What made me persona non grata? On paper, I was a good fit for the job. I am a black woman with decades of experience teaching in public schools and leading workshops on diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism. At the Los Angeles Unified School District, I established a network to help minority teachers attain National Board Certification. I designed and facilitated numerous teacher trainings and developed a civic-education program that garnered accolades from the LAUSD Board of Education.

My crime at De Anza was running afoul of the tenets of critical social justice, a worldview that understands knowledge as relative and tied to unequal identity-based power dynamics that must be exposed and dismantled. This, I came to recognize, was the unofficial but strictly enforced ideological orthodoxy of De Anza—as it is at many other educational institutions. When I interviewed for the job in August 2021, there was no indication that I would be required to adhere to this particular vision of social justice. On the contrary, I was informed during the interview process that the office I would be working in had been alienating some faculty with a “too-woke” approach that involved “calling people out.” (After I was hired, this sentiment was echoed by many faculty, staff, and administrators I spoke to.) I told the hiring committee that I valued open dialogue and viewpoint diversity. Given their decision to hire me, I imagined I would find broad support for the vision I had promised to bring to my new role. I was wrong.

Even before any substantive conflicts came to a head, warning lights started flashing. Within my first two weeks on the job, a staff member in my office revealed he had also been a finalist for my position and objected to the fact that I had been chosen over someone who had been there for years “doing the work.” I would have a rough ride ahead, this person told me—and, indeed, I would. It also soon became clear that my supervising dean and her aligned colleagues were attempting to prevent me from performing my duties.

From the beginning, efforts to obstruct my work were framed in terms that might seem bizarre to those outside certain academic spaces. For instance, simply attempting to set an agenda for meetings caused my colleagues to  accuse me of “whitespeaking,” “whitesplaining,” and reinforcing “white supremacy”—accusations I had never faced before. I was initially baffled, but as I attended workshops led by my officemates and promoted by my supervising dean, I repeatedly encountered a presentation slide titled “Characteristics of White-Supremacy Culture” that denounced qualities like “sense of urgency” and “worship of the written word.” Written meeting agendas apparently checked both boxes.

You may have encountered this graphic or similar ones before. Derived from Kenneth Jones’s and Tema Okun’s 2001 book, Dismantling Racism, it has appeared in different forms on many institutional websites, sometimes provoking controversy. After all, doesn’t the statement that “objectivity” and “perfectionism” are “white” qualities seem kind of, well, racist? On these grounds, the National Museum of African American History eventually saw fit to remove a “White-Supremacy Culture” page from its site in 2020. But if you are wondering whether this document is still circulating and being cited inside publicly funded educational institutions, the unfortunate answer is yes.

As I attended more events and spoke with more people, I realized that the institutional redefinition of familiar terms wasn’t limited to “white supremacy.” Race, racism, equality, and equity, I discovered, meant different things to my coworkers and supervising dean than they did to me. One of my officemates displayed a graphic of apples dropping to the ground from a tree, with the explanation that “equity means everybody gets some of the apples”; my officemates and supervising dean praised him for this “accurate definition.” When I pointed out that this definition seemed to focus solely on equality of outcomes, without any attention to equality of opportunity or power, it was made clear this perspective wasn’t welcome. “Equity” and “equality,” for my colleagues, were separate and even opposed concepts, and as one of them told me, the aspiration to equality was “a thing of the past.”

Having recognized these differences, I attempted to use them as starting points for dialogue. In the workshops I led, I sought to make space for people to share their own definitions of various concepts and then to identify common points of reference that we could rally around, even as we acknowledged and accepted differences of perspective.

In one workshop, for instance, I presented a chart summarizing two different racial-justice outlooks. The first was what I have called the neo-reconstructionist perspective popularized by Ibram X. Kendi’s bestseller How to Be an Antiracist, which presents an individual’s destiny as determined by social identity and holds that present racial discrimination can be an appropriate remedy for past racial discrimination and that ultimate emancipation from racism isn’t possible. I juxtaposed these views with those promoted by the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, which takes a more open-ended view of oppression and privilege, wherein human destiny is determined by human choices, racial discrimination in all forms is rejected, and emancipation from racism is seen as possible and desirable. Without editorializing, I gave participants time to notice the differences between the perspectives. We then came together and shared things that these two seemingly divergent philosophies had in common. The aim was to enable a conversation between two perspectives that I already saw at play in divisions on campus about how to approach issues of race.

When I was evaluated as part of the tenure process, some of my evaluators objected to such efforts to identify points of commonality between divergent viewpoints. They also objected to such views being presented at all. One evaluator, who described herself as a “third-wave antiracist,” aligning her with Kendi’s philosophy, made clear that the way I had presented her worldview was deeply offensive. Another evaluator objected to my presentation of “dangerous ideas” drawn from the scholarship of Sheena Mason, whose theory of “racelessness” presents race as something that can be overcome. This evaluator told me that it was disrespectful of me to set Kendi’s and Mason’s views side-by-side or to treat them as at all comparable.

A dogmatic understanding of social justice shaped organizational and hiring practices. One of the faculty seated on my tenure-review committee invited me to join a socialist network she was a member of. I declined, confessing that I don’t identify with that (or any other) political label. She later observed one of my workshops and wrote up an evaluation before meeting with me to have a conversation about the workshop. I had been told that the post-observation conversation was an important part of the evaluation process. When we finally spoke, after she had already drafted her evaluation, she was dismissive and quickly terminated the conversation, stating we had nothing more to talk about. She proceeded to file her evaluation as it was written prior to our meeting.

This evaluator later gave me a “needs-improvement” rating on the rubric for the “accepts-criticism” criterion. Her aligned colleagues repeatedly assigned me the same rating. It was clear that this rating was rooted in ideological concerns, rather than any substantive objections to my performance. Anything short of lockstep adherence to critical social justice was impermissible. “Criticism” was only supposed to go in one direction. Contextualizing my colleagues’ views and comparing them to other approaches to the same issues, much less criticizing them, was “dangerous”; my supposed failure to “accept criticism” was, simply put, a refusal to accept without question the dogmas these colleagues saw as beyond criticism.

The conflicts were not limited to my tenure-review process. At every turn, I experienced strident opposition when I deviated from the accepted line. When I brought Jewish speakers to campus to address anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, some of my critics branded me a “dirty Zionist” and a “right-wing extremist.” When I formed the Heritage Month Workgroup, bringing together community members to create a multifaith holiday and heritage month calendar, the De Anza student government voted to support this effort. However, my officemates and dean explained to me that such a project was unacceptable, because it didn’t focus on “decentering whiteness.”

When I later sought the support of our academic senate for the Heritage Month project, one opponent asked me if it was “about all the Jewish-inclusion stuff you have been pushing here,” and argued that the senate shouldn’t support the Heritage Month Workgroup efforts, because I was attempting to “turn our school into a religious school.” The senate president deferred to this claim, and the workgroup was denied support.

Just hours after this senate meeting, a group of colleagues attended the Foothill-De Anza Board of Trustees meeting and called for my immediate termination. (A public video of this meeting is available.) These individuals claimed to represent campus racial-affinity groups, but they hadn’t polled their group members or gotten consensus on the statements they issued. This sort of dynamic, where single individuals present themselves as speaking for entire groups, is part and parcel of the critical-social-justice approach. It allows individuals to present their ideological viewpoints as unassailable, since they supposedly represent the experience of the entire identity group to which they belong. Hence, any criticism can be framed as an attack on the group.

The majority of the people employed at De Anza College aren’t ideological extremists. During my time there, people who had previously opted not to engage with my office started to attend my workshops and told me how refreshing my approach was. When under review, I presented letters from collaborators who worked with me on each workshop I facilitated, participant evaluations, and a great deal of other material attesting to the positive impact of my work. None of these things mattered to the board of trustees, the chancellor, or the president. Only the narratives that were put forth by the ideologically biased evaluators mattered. I was fired, in other words, for delivering exactly what I had promised to in my job interview. For those who sought my termination, the same approach that appealed to faculty previously alienated by my office’s divisive callout culture was a threat to the college’s “equity progress.”

For those within the critical-social-justice-ideological complex, asking questions, encouraging other people to ask questions, and considering multiple perspectives—all of these things, which should be central to academic work, are an existential danger. The advocates of critical social justice emphasize oppression and tribalistic identity, and believe that a just society must ensure equality of outcomes; this is in contrast to a classical social-justice approach, which focuses on freedom and individuality, understands knowledge as objective and tied to agency and free will, and believes that a just society emphasizes equality of opportunity. The monoculture of critical social justice needs to suppress this alternative worldview and insulate itself from criticism so its advocates can maintain their dominant position. Protection of orthodoxy supersedes all else: collegiality, professionalism, the truth.

My case, sadly, isn’t unique. At colleges across the country, critical-social-justice adherents are inserting their ideological stances as the supreme determinants of whether candidates advance in the tenure-review process. Faculty are under pressure to profess their allegiance to this particular set of dogmas and to embed a certain way of talking and thinking about race into their course curriculum. They are being encouraged to categorize every student as a victim or an oppressor, and to devote their classes to indoctrination.

If certain ideologues have their way, compelled speech will become an even more common aspect of university life. Faculty and staff will be obligated to declare their gender pronouns and to use gender-neutral terms like “Latinx” and “Filipinx,” even as many members of the groups in question view these terms as expressions of cultural and linguistic imperialism. Soon enough, we may also be formally required to start all classes and meetings with land acknowledgments, regardless of how empty a gesture this may seem to living members of tribal nations.

All of these things are on the horizon, because faculty members are afraid to resist. They know that anyone who questions these practices will be accused of racism and other grave sins. Because critical-social-justice advocates often present themselves as representatives of their identity groups, any criticisms of them can be treated as an attack on the groups they claim to stand for. By this and other means, they ensure their worldview is unassailable. Although I knew I had colleagues who supported my approach, most had been pressured into silence.

As my experience shows, questioning the reigning orthodoxies does carry many risks. But the alternative is worse. Authoritarian ideologies advance through a reliance on intimidation and the compliance of the majority, which cowers in silence—instead of speaking up. Engaging in civil discourse and ensuring that multiple perspectives are presented are crucial, if we want to preserve the components of education that ideologues are seeking to destroy.

There is some reason to hope. Since my firing, I have been contacted by scores of people who have said that they are attempting to resist similar pressures. As bleak as things may seem, there are many who still believe in academia as a space where divergent viewpoints can and must be explored.

==

If you took this story and changed some of the nouns, it could easily be the story of an atheist at an institution dominated by religious people.

You can't just be an atheist and a moral person. Being one of the Good™ people isn't about being moral or ethical, because they define it as being a member of the religion. Every atheist has encountered this.

Matthew 12:30

He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad.

https://quranx.com/63.4

They are as (worthless as hollow) pieces of timber propped up, (unable to stand on their own). They think that every cry is against them. They are the enemies; so beware of them. The curse of Allah be on them! How are they deluded (away from the Truth)!

When you are a member, it doesn't even matter how you behave or what you do (unless you do anything too much like the Bad™ people), because you're one of the tribe and, by definition, one of Us™ and we are Good™.

This is exactly the same thing. It's not enough to be antiracist in a liberal way ("the content of their character") or even in a Xian way ("we are all God's children"). No, you have to be "antiracist" on their terms. It's not about shared values or ideals, or even results. It's about compliance with their dogma and yielding to their (imagined) moral authority.

[skinnerhousebooks]

Check out these workshops related to Skinner House titles at this year’s General Assembly: 

The Rough Side of the Mountain, edited by Rev. Qiyamah A. Rahman and Incantations for Rest by Atena O. Danner, among others—workshop: Interrogating the Gaze of Unitarian Universalist Women Writers 

The Darkness Divine by Rev. Kristen L. Harper—workshop: Next Steps into Antiracism and Reparations 

Held by Rev. Barbara F. Meyers—workshop: Mental Health Peer Support in Congregations 

A Fire at the Center by Rev. Karen Van Fossan—workshop: Colonialism: Religious Vision, Pursuit of Profit, or Both

[michaelseanharris]

Mike's Moment Of... Light Unpacking: We Are The Canon EP 040

We’ve reached EP 40!! My final episode in the season of #MikesMomentOf 🎉 This episode we do some Light Unpacking of a workshop run by Daphnie and Karl called We Are The Canon! Link in bio or http://linktr.ee/aelsean

. . . #theaterarts #directing #decolonizingcurriculum #antiracism #tertiaryeducation #AmericasRaceProblem #artsactivism #latinx #latin #TheatreforSocialChange #Jamaican #BlackTheater #AfroLatinX #UnPacking #WeAreTheCanon

Daphnie Sicre

Daphnie is currently researching the Afro-Latinx experience in theatre, which analyzes the discourse of race in performance-with particular interest in Latinx and Black Theatre. The focal point of her dissertation was the Afro-Latinx experience within the play Platanos & Collard Greens. She also focuses on Theatre for Social Change perspectives especially for Latinx Theatre, Latin American Theatre, Black Theatre, & Theatre of the Oppressed. Plus theories and practices of Hip Hop Theatre and Applied Theatre.

Karl O’Brian Williams

Karl O’Brian Williams is a Jamaican-born actor, playwright, producer, and educator. His acting career has taken him from stages in the Caribbean to those in New York, Toronto, and the United Kingdom. In 2019 he was co-writer on the short film “Winston,” which received the following film festival selections: the Hip Hop Film Festival, Bronzelens, Circle City Film Festival, Queen City Film Festival, the Pan African Film Festival & the African-American Film Festival – the screenplay was adapted from Williams’ Monologue “The Kept Man.”

Links in Bio Apple Podcasts Links to Podcast, Book and Website Folkbeats & Blipspeak Single: All Forgiven www.michaelseanharris.com

  The Book (Commission earned): Mike's Pocket Performance Pointers on Audible Mike's Pocket Performance Pointers on Amazon

Check out this episode!

[jkottke]

A Powerful Lesson in Discrimination

Calling it one of their most requested videos, PBS's Frontline has uploaded to YouTube their 1985 program on schoolteacher Jane Elliott's powerful lesson in discrimination. The video shows how, in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, Elliott divided her third-grade class into those with blue eyes and those with non-blue eyes and then instructed the non-blue-eyed group to treat the blue-eyed group as inferior. The resulting behavior is fascinating, upsetting, and illuminating.

Elliott went on to become a noted antiracism activist and has done blue eyes/brown eyes workshops with groups of adults and teens. And she goes hard at them -- see this video and this video for instance.

I'm trying to get the people who participate in this exercise the opportunity to find out how it feels like to be something other than white in this society. 'Alright people, I'm Jane Elliott and I'm your resident bitch for the day and make no mistake about that, that is exactly what this is about.' I do this in a mean, nasty way because racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, ethnocentrism are mean and nasty.

I would also highly recommend watching this brief clip of a talk by Elliott. In less than a minute, she deftly skewers the idea that racial discrimination doesn't exist in America and calls out white Americans' complicity in allowing it to persist.

I want every white person in this room who would be happy to be treated as this society in general treats our black citizens -- if you as a white person would be happy to receive the same treatment that our black citizens do in this society, please stand.

[Nobody stands.]

You didn't understand the directions. If you white folks want to be treated the way blacks are in this society, stand. Nobody's standing here. That says very plainly that you know what's happening, you know you don't want it for you. I want to know why you're so willing to accept it or to allow it to happen for others.

Freedom for some is not freedom.