this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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South Carolina high school English teacher Mary Wood was reprimanded last school year for teaching a lesson on race. She began teaching it again this year.

Mary Wood walked between the desks in her AP English Language and Composition classroom, handing out copies of the book she was already punished once for teaching.

Twenty-six students, all but two of them White, looked down at Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” a memoir that dissects what it means to be Black in America — and which drew calls for Wood’s firing when she tried to teach it last year in her mostly White, conservative town. Wood crossed to a lectern and placed her hands on either side of a turquoise notebook, open to two pages of bullet points explaining why she wanted to teach Coates’s work.

“That book that you guys have, it deals with racism,” she said on a recent Tuesday. “It’s going to be something with which you’re unfamiliar. That you need to spend time to research to fully understand.”

Wood stared at her class. She tried to make eye contact with every teenager. Anyone, she reminded herself, might be secretly recording her — or planning to report her.

...

Plus, both teachers believed the book, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is superbly written: a master class in the deployment of rhetorical devices. There was no better way to teach children how to formulate their own arguments, they thought.

“It teaches kids a different perspective, [it] teaches kids how to write well,” Wood said in an interview. And “it’s the right thing to do.”

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[–] rockSlayer@lemmy.world 99 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Good. We need more activist teachers willing to teach the realities of race and racism. It would help if the teacher unions got more militant too.

[–] themeatbridge@lemmy.world 68 points 9 months ago (7 children)

This isn't activism. It's honesty.

[–] rockSlayer@lemmy.world 81 points 9 months ago

You're correct that it's honesty. Honesty becomes activism when the truth is banned.

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[–] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 91 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Last spring, two students in that year’s English class had complained to the school board, alleging that “Between the World and Me,” which contends racism is embedded in American society, made them ashamed to be White.

What a pair of awful little shits.

[–] A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 61 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I bet their parents were 10 times worse.

[–] shani66@ani.social 25 points 9 months ago

They, frankly, should be ashamed. Although, ashamed in general.

[–] the_q@lemmy.world 77 points 9 months ago

Good for her.

[–] FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 42 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Not all heroes wear capes.

Well. She might. I dunno.

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[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 39 points 9 months ago (5 children)

I love what she's doing. That said-

“That book that you guys have, it deals with racism,” she said on a recent Tuesday. “It’s going to be something with which you’re unfamiliar. That you need to spend time to research to fully understand.”

I doubt they're unfamiliar with racism, what with being raised by white conservative southerners. They probably heard the N-word a thousand times before they could say it themselves.

Of course, they're very unfamiliar with being at the receiving end of racism, something that Ta-Nehisi Coates can teach them a lot about.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 39 points 9 months ago (3 children)

I doubt they’re unfamiliar with racism, what with being raised by white conservative southerners. They probably heard the N-word a thousand times before they could say it themselves.

Hi, white southerner here. FYI, that's really not how it works. Regardless of whatever behavior they've grown up with, they most likely don't think it's "racist;" they think it's "normal." Hell, they might even "have a black friend" who is "one of the good ones" and are perfectly polite to any well-dressed, middle-class, Carlton-from-Fresh-Prince-of-Bel-Air-esque black person they occasionally interact with. It's just all those other "criminal" "hoodlums" from the "inner city" that they have a problem with, and they'll swear up and down that the reason is anything but race (absolutely refusing to understand the concept of institutional racism, or indeed, cause-and-effect in general).

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[–] MicroWave@lemmy.world 19 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Looks like she thinks the kids might lack exposure because they're rich:

Both teachers knew that most teens in Chapin — a wealthy town where the median income is above $100,000 and large homes line pretty Lake Murray — had never read anything like Coates’s searing account of growing up Black in Baltimore. They had not spent their childhood, as Coates wrote he did, “naked … before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease.” They had never memorized “a list of prohibited blocks,” unsafe due to guns and violence.

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[–] WarmSoda@lemm.ee 20 points 9 months ago

Hey! She's trying to edumacate us!

[–] stratosfear@lemmy.sdf.org 18 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

This book is so good, if you have not read it please do. The audiobook is narrated by the author.

-- Gen x northern European dude

[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 17 points 9 months ago

If anyone needs to be taught what it's like to be black in America, it's white people in America.

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