FWIW, they've retracted it. Posters here explained it to me to the point that I understood where these folks were coming from, though I didn't actually agree with them.
After an editorial in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer they took down the editorial and
put the following statement in its place.
CC
who is not as sold on school choice as the editorial writer, btw.
3 comments:
I can never understand how racial realists (for that is the technical definition for them) equate fighting racism with facism. People don't understand current racism. Read up on it. "Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Colorblind Society" is a good, fact laden book. It's actually written in response to racial realist writings, so to fully understand some arguements you have to read the other books.
This is also the major problem with our school systems though. Rich people refuse to make the schools equal. That's the failure of local education, it creates a distinct inequality based on class.
I realize that Seattle is still teaching standard American english.
But if they put their ideas into practice and started teaching that all dialects of english were equal, I would probably pull my kid out of school and send them to private school. I suspect a great many middle class parents would do the same under the theory that kid needs to know SAE to come of well to colleges and in job interviews.
Wouldn't that reinforce the class system even more?
CC
Wouldn't that reinforce the class system even more?
Not if they really were teaching SAE: If all students had the opportunity to learn to speak SAE, then it would do the opposite of reinforcing class by bringing everyone into the middle class through language. (If there were still a middle class...different discussion....)
It is my observation that much of what we take for racism is really classism -- black people who speak SAE are often treated differently (and better) than those who don't. At least here in the North where anyone with a Southern accent is a bit suspect. (I know I shouldn't say stuff like this, but it really is what I've observed.)
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