Mica Pollock, an "anthropologist of education," which I assume means that she excavates fossilized Australopithecus pencil boxes in the Olduvai Gorge, graciously comments about my last post (in which I quoted from an interview with her about her new book):
I too believe in clarity. I'll use shorter sentences for you. These come straight from my book, Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real about Race in School.
Antiracism in education involves:
1. Rejecting false notions of human difference
2. Acknowledging lived experiences shaped along racial lines
3. Learning from diverse forms of knowledge and experience
4. Challenging systems of racial inequality.
Brevity doesn't equal clarity, and I remain befuddled. For instance, if #1 and #3 refer to race--that is, if race is a false notion of difference and also the diversity to which #3 refers--which I think they do, then??is it not the case that??#1 contradicts #3? Come to think of it, what does #3 actually mean? I recently wrote a piece about how one school district attempts to teach "diverse forms of knowledge and experience," and it didn't sound like that district was doing a very good thing at all. And how are teachers supposed to go about??attending to #4? Are they to teach math and science and history, or are they to do more #2ish-type educating? And how does this all relate to Australopithecus?