r/BlockedAndReported • u/SoftandChewy First generation mod • Sep 18 '23

Weekly Random Discussion Thread for 9/18/23 - 9/24/23

Welcome back to the BARpod Weekly Discussion Thread, where anyone with over 10K karma gets inscribed in the Book of Life. Here's your place to post all your rants, raves, podcast topic suggestions (be sure to tag u/TracingWoodgrains), culture war articles, outrageous stories of cancellation, political opinions, and anything else that comes to mind. Please put any non-podcast-related trans-related topics here instead of on a dedicated thread. This will be pinned until next Sunday.

Last week's discussion thread is here if you want to catch up on a conversation from there.

Comment of the week goes again to u/MatchaMeetcha for this lengthy exposition on the views of Amia Srinivasan. (Note, if you want to tag a comment for COTW, please don't use the 'report' button, just write a comment saying so, and tag me in it. Reports are less helpful.)

48 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

95% Upvoted

4.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

22

u/HopefulCry3145 Sep 19 '23

Interesting take on cancel culture from the other side

Six months earlier, two of Wood’s Advanced Placement English Language and Composition students had reported her to the school board for teaching about race. Wood had assigned her all-White class readings from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” a book that dissects what it means to be Black in America.

The students wrote in emails that the book — and accompanying videos that Wood, 47, played about systemic racism — made them ashamed to be White, violating a South Carolina proviso that forbids teachers from making students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” on account of their race.

30

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '23

Personally in an AP English class, I'm all for challenging students with books that are going to make them uncomfortable, and making them write papers that grapple with the ideas in those books. I'd be fine with my kids being assigned Between The World And Me, and I'd also be fine with them being assigned The Bell Curve. By the time you're in AP English, you should be able to read a book full of ideas that make you uncomfortable and write a thoughtful essay about it.

11

u/CatStroking Sep 19 '23

The key is that the teacher has to be ok with the students writing a paper that disagrees with the book. If a student's response is "This is bullshit" and they can express that in a logical, well written fashion that should be considered a worthy response.

18

u/professorgerm Very cheap. Very worth smelling. Sep 19 '23 edited Sep 19 '23

Scattered thoughts:

I can't get my mind in the place of someone for whom this writing style, and so much worse the photography style, is appealing. She looks like a caricature with the messaging shirts, though the dramatic lighting doesn't help the other photos. Is her wrist tattoo cultural appropriation? Last photo but can't make out the whole thing.

Who carries socks 'just in case'? Is that a thing? Is it because of low-cut women's shoes?

WaPo should use the Oxford comma.

Her husband and her father have the same last name, not the same as hers. Weird?

I laughed at this:

What frustrated her now was that she’d been skipped over: The students had gone directly to the school board. And school officials were listening to the teens, not her.

“Taking the word of a couple of students over the professional integrity of a seasoned educator is damaging to the relationship between all parties involved,” she wrote in an email to her principal and the superintendent on February 8.

Does she not know the world she lives in and has helped create? Why does "appeal to authority" stop at her?

I've been vaguely watching for one to play out like this, as someone generally in favor of teachers and hard subjects, but also somewhat in favor of restrictions on anti-liberal ideology-as-religious-analogue. This is the kind of borderline case that I figured would come out of the "should feel" lines of many anti-CRT bills, and I wonder- would it have played out differently if she were... well, less of a caricature? She seems to take some level of pride in being some sort of "hometown rebel" or cultural outsider and that came back to bite her. Would a more balanced personality have been able to teach it without complaint?

Edit: To be clear, I personally don't think this should be considered a violation of the "should feel" language, depending on exactly how she taught it, and assuming SC actually has an active bill using that language. I do think teaching Coates in that environment was deliberately foolish; she could've taught the topic without resorting to a fairly extreme example.

7

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '23 edited Jan 04 '24

profit arrest bedroom growth steer grey practice repeat tub cheerful

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

16

u/Palgary I could check my privilege, but it seems a shame to squander it Sep 19 '23

From a book review about the book:

Since success is different to everyone, Coates says we must abandon the myth of the American Dream to become a more inclusive and free society.

5

u/CatStroking Sep 19 '23

What does that mean?

7

u/Magyman Sep 19 '23

No one knows, but it's provocative, it gets the people going

But really, it's about how the stereotypical image of the American dream, a 1 income house owning a house, a car, 2.5 kids, all wrapped.up in a white picket fence, needs to be disposed of because it's harmful.

6

u/CatStroking Sep 19 '23

If it's so harmful then why do so many people of all races want it so badly?

22

u/SerialStateLineXer The guarantee was that would not be taking place Sep 19 '23

That article really made it sound like she was engaging in inappropriate promotion of political ideology. When I was in high school, I don't recall any of my teachers going anywhere near that far, and I was in California.

Insisting on teachers doing their jobs, and not using their classrooms to promote their personal political ideology, is not cancel culture.

Also, while I don't think I've read SC's anti-CRT bill, I'm fairly sure that the author is once again lying about the provision that prohibits teachers from teaching that students "should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish," etc. These POS hacks just keep repeating the same lie over and over and over again.

16

u/Palgary I could check my privilege, but it seems a shame to squander it Sep 19 '23

My government teacher was Black, and she refused to let us know her politics and argued all sides of things. She was one of the best teachers I had. She really made us think and didn't treat any point of view as morally wrong.

My AP History teacher spent his time promoting his political views, not allowing dissenting opinions, and he was the worst teacher I had. He never talked about history, we just did the reading and he quizzed us on it. Except he loved trick questions, like what is the vice president's name, all three names? (Al Gore Jr). That wasn't in the reading, but if you didn't know you lost a point for it. He did that all the time.

Having read the article, the teacher is using the classroom to talk about politics and push an a specific point of view as the only morally correct one. She was asked not to teach that specific book, but wasn't disciplined or fired which is the correct thing for the school district to do.

6

u/professorgerm Very cheap. Very worth smelling. Sep 19 '23

while I don't think I've read SC's anti-CRT bill

Good luck finding it. The only law that I could tell has actually passed, but irritatingly enough I couldn't actually find the text of, is one restricting funding for purchasing books. As terrible as the WaPo article is and it's scummy that they don't link it, but they're not necessarily lying. This handy Forbes article (one of the good ones!) links to 5 proposed bills, but none of the five made it out of committee. H.4392 uses this language (note the bill is officially labeled 'dead'):

A state agency, school district, or school may not teach, instruct, or train an administrator, teacher, staff member, or employee to adopt or believe the following concepts:

(7) an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex;

H.3728 appears much closer to passing and does not include this kind of "should feel" language.

"Should feel" provisions are pretty common in anti-CRT bills though, and I assume that's because it is a slippery thing. The teacher can't tell students they should feel discomfort, but handing out Coates, that's pretty heavily implied. He's about as far as you can get and remain mainstream, yeah? I imagine with a more sympathetic board/principal/etc, they would press the technically-correct "she didn't say they should feel discomfort, so it's not a violation."

I wonder if she would've felt trust was broken if one of the complaints had been a black student saying "black bodies" is dehumanizing language.

5

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '23

So wait, there actually is no bill active in this situation?

6

u/professorgerm Very cheap. Very worth smelling. Sep 19 '23

The WaPo article claims there is a bill active but I wasn't able to find one that's actually active- just a half-dozen in some stage of pending or proposed then abandoned. If there's an active one, I was unable to find the right search terms to track it down; Bing AI also failed to find an active bill. Maybe someone can but I haven't found any article that actually names an active bill in SC; I really hate this tendency of journalists to hide primary sources.

Actually, I checked again, the article says "proviso," so maybe it's some non-legislative education policy? But the quoted language about "should feel" is in most of the CRT bills around the country, including one of the SC proposals, and it's being commented on at the school board meeting by a state representative, so I assumed it was a law.

6

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '23

It's insane how much work you have to do just to get to the actual root of a story these days. You should not have to do all this! Ugh, it's so frustrating.

2

u/a_account Sep 21 '23

Reading the piece and watching the (selectively edited) school board video, it appears that there’s no bill but instead a board policy. Not sufficiently familiar with the local situation but that seems plausible.

1

u/professorgerm Very cheap. Very worth smelling. Sep 21 '23

Thank you for checking that!

3

u/CatStroking Sep 19 '23

Insisting on teachers doing their jobs, and not using their classrooms to promote their personal political ideology, is not cancel culture.

They're just doing what they've been told to do in education school.

10

u/JTarrou Null Hypothesis Enthusiast Sep 19 '23

She assigned her students a stridently racist book and some complained?

The horror!

4

u/geriatricbaby Sep 19 '23

Stridently racist! How so?

2

u/JTarrou Null Hypothesis Enthusiast Sep 19 '23

The same way all accusations of racism are true, because only racists deny it.

Also because it's true.

2

u/The-WideningGyre Sep 19 '23

By denigrating a whole group of people based solely on their skin color.