I would like you to read the following quote and tell me what it is really saying and what it is advocating. Dr. Chris Emdin of Columbia University writes: "I want white teachers to teach in the hood, believe it or not. I'm for that. But I want them to do it in a way that makes them effective and not burnt out. Black teachers with white supremacist ideologies [are] just as dangerous as white folks who don't understand culture."
Your time is up. If you understood or guessed that Emdin is advocating for the continued dysfunctional and destructive behavior that has plagued blacks and specifically those in urban environs for generations, then you understood correctly.
Just what are the "white supremacist ideologies" associated with the presentation of factual American history, civics, mathematics, English, science, biology, chemistry, the study of Shakespearean literature, English literature, engineering, physics, personal finance, personal health and hygiene, etc.?
Tell me how teaching the factuality of Washington at Valley Forge and the American Revolution evidences "white supremacist ideologies." Tell me how teaching cell structure, teaching about disease and teaching the periodic table of elements is a "white supremacist ideological" construct.
Tell me how teaching proper grammar and sentence construction, personal hygiene and personal finance is a "white supremacist ideology."
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Emdin, like his kind before him and specifically like the black Muslim front group that calls itself The Black Star Project and masquerades as a group advocating educational advancement, is nothing more than a perpetuation of the racism of low expectations.
Emdin, as quoted by Kenya Downs says: "The narrative itself … falsely positions the teacher, oftentimes a white teacher, as hero." (See "What 'White Folks Who Teach In The Hood' Get Wrong About Education," pbs.org, March 28, 2017.) That's a claim sans any pretense of overt prejudice and the demonstrative rejection of modernity. Bill Ayers and Angela Davis, two of the vilest domestic terrorists ever birthed on American soil, are presented as heroes to the same students referenced by Downs.
Downs writes that Emdin "draws parallels between current urban educational models and Native American schools of the past that measured success by how well students adapted to forced assimilation." Are we to take by that reasoning that the Native Americans were better off not being able to add, subtract, read, write and attend to the basic realities of day-to-day life consistent with modernity, by continuing to dress in skins and feathers? Were they better off living in teepees or structures with indoor plumbing? Were they better off not advancing to the point of owning casinos based upon the application and implementation of what they were "forced to learn?"
Indians, or Native Americans as political correctness identifies them, were just as cruel to other tribes as the so-called white man was to them as a whole. Just as Africans were enslavers, merchants and death dealers to other Africans, but I digress.
Downs writes that Emdin "calls for a new approach to urban education that trains teachers to value the unique realities of minority children, incorporating their culture into classroom instruction."
In literary terms, the afore-stated rationality should be viewed as deeply flawed merism. The question that goes unanswered is what has this mindset done to elevate those it is pressed upon? Just how do Emdin and Downs propose to utilize the stark realities of the environment children in urban environments are growing up in? Are they to learn addition, subtraction and other mathematical constructs by using the number of gangbangers added or killed in a given period of time? Are they to learn business by utilizing the models of drug dealers? Are they to model the dysfunctional homes they were born into?
That which is being advocated is no different than San Diego, San Bernardino and Oakland, California, schools systems institutionalizing black children being taught Ebonics instead of standard English.
Emdin and Downs are advocating the most destructive form of disservice that can be perpetrated upon any group of people, and they are doing it based exclusively on skin color. They are advocating that the destructive, amoral, dysfunctional reality of the urban environs be maintained as cultural norms. They are foolishly advocating for the rejection of modernity based upon skin color. This brings me back to the question that both Downs and Emdin carefully avoided and that is: Just how has that mindset helped black urban students?
Skin color doesn't teach students – qualified, dedicated teachers do. If the ideology Emdin advocates and Downs applauds worked, there would be empirical evidence of same in every school district controlled by black school boards and teachers. If the dysfunctional urban environment and amoral climate within same worked, Chicago would not be leading the world in blacks murdering blacks, and black parents would not be embracing educational vouchers to get their children out of failed public school systems.
That which Emdin calls for does nothing but further skin color-based acrimony and victimology. It is a commitment to self-segregation and lowered expectations for success. And even more criminal, it is the redefining of success based upon calculated failure.
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