MinterTom  Aug.24.2019 0 Comments

..more than ever these days, the answer is: James Baldwin. Nikita Stewart’s expansive insight in the New York Times is presented as: The 1619 Project, whose endeavor is to examine slavery in the root of our culture. It is offered in detailed process, causing readers to reflect on the still insoluble sutures in the making of a nation. Yesterday’s Project reading, Why Can't We Teach Slavery Right In American Schools, woke right into education, leaving errant threads for thinking pulled. Some public response to this project series suggests that Truth can only be determined by anyone not African American; blinking at that, is to miss the basis for continuing acts of racism. Such response is the intentionality in dissolving the very frame that Nikita Stewart means us to use as portal, in hopes of excavating deeper and meaningful conversations that do not happen in any uniformity.   “Unlike math and reading, states are not required to meet academic content standards for teaching social studies and United States history. That means that there is no consensus on the curriculum around slavery, no uniform recommendation to explain an institution that was debated in the crafting of the Constitution and that has influenced nearly every aspect of American society since.”   For me though, along this journey, there is another knot: how do we speak to racism, if we cannot speak race in its format? How do we articulate the different landscapes of critical thinking, between James Baldwin and Alain Locke.. - without speaking the nuances in their purposed language of shade, in color, caste and class?   Sides in this will continue to come about out of their own like purposes; but it is especially in the classroom, through context for Youth and students, where frame for critical thinking must offer scaffolding to grapple questions of incongruent influences, in the conflict of realties and perceptions.

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