grandifacepalm asked: A while ago you mentioned how higher education empowers racism. If you’re willing, would you expand on how it does that? I know about the Eurocentrism in higher education, but I don’t really know much more beyond that and racism among students. I usually don’t ask questions like this, but it’s hard to find info on this from academic communities (for relatively obvious reasons).
Tumblr just showed me this ask, which is probably fitting giving what happened to me in class last night. See, here’s the thing about higher ed (and our society in general) the focus on presenting the work of white men as knowledge everyone needs, while framing the work of everyone who is not a white male as something interesting, but not ultimately necessary feeds into the idea that no one else has contributed as much, achieved as much, or is worth as much as white men. That message never ever stops being sent out. Not in the media, or in school, or in day to day life so when people resist that message the programmed response is anger at their denial of “reality”. Think about how departments are broken up into Women’s studies, Native American Studies, African American Studies, all those boxes make it sound like the only women are white and that POC exist to be add ons to the white experience. And that’s what liberal arts schools are doing under the guise of diversity and inclusiveness. Safe spaces are great, but if you don’t require the majority to learn about the marginalized, or teach them to value the contributions of marginalized people then they remain invested in the idea that their supremacy is guaranteed & everyone else is lucky to be in the room.
And I don’t think it’s just liberal arts either, I mean, this kind of goes with what I was just mentioning about *S*cience. Because all those kids who major in evolutionary biology are taking just regular english lit classes as an elective, they don’t get taught that the contributions of people who aren’t white males were culturally significant, building a bias that then shows up in their science.
Welp…
(via bad-dominicana)
