3 LA Teachers Removed Over Choice Of Black Heroes OJ Simpson? Dennis Rodman? RuPaul? Seriously? This is the sort of article I would have expected to find on The Onion. There are plenty of famous, accomplished black people that could have been used as examples of "heroes" - Clarence Thomas, Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King, Jr., Chris Gardner, etc. - so what made these teachers think that a criminal and two people who are famous for nothing more than being outrageous were the best options available?
Exploitation? The current theory, or accusation as such, is that they intended to mock Black History Month and exploit schoolchildren. We'll see whether that holds up.
Hadn't heard this but it's interesting. Wouldn't really surprise me, to tell the truth. This either comes down to racism or the teachers being incredibly stupid. Which is worse?
I should have quoted it the first time .... M'apologies. It was in the topic article: District Superintendent Ramon Cortines placed the teachers — all white men who teach first, second and fourth grades — on administrative leave on Tuesday while an investigation is conducted, Pollard-Terry said. "The superintendent will not let anyone make a mockery out of Black History Month," she said. The issue was brought to district officials' attention by the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP after the organization received a complaint early Monday, chapter President Leon Jenkins said. Jenkins said he felt the teachers acted in concert to mock black heroes and children's innocence. "These are not the people we want our young people to emulate or believe these people represent the best of the African-American community," Jenkins said. "It's hard for the NAACP to believe this was a mistake." (Hoag) Couldn't say. But, at some point, racism is stupidity. I suppose the distinction is still important, though. ____________________ Notes: Hoag, Christina. "3 LA teachers removed over choice of black heroes". March 3, 2010. News.Yahoo.com. March 4, 2010. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100304/ap_on_re_us/us_black_history_suspensions
Well yeah that is a pretty paltry line up of african american heroes for sure but perhaps they should not have been removed but given a different set of role models to choose from.
If there was some pre-approved list of black "heroes" for the teachers to choose from, and these three were on the list, that definitely changes things in my mind about the situation. If it was done as a joke, I'd say it's inappropriate to use this job to promote your humor. School are for learning, not satire. Maybe they had a problem with the idea of Black History Month? Fair enough, and I might even agree with some of their views on this. But teachers are supposed to teach the students the required subjects, not ignore parts of the lesson plans they find objectionable. If that's the case, they should have taken their concerns to the principal or school board.
On the one hand, I did laugh. Ru Paul. Heh. But really, it is pretty stupid. They should definitely be canned.
I wonder how many they had to come up with? Apparently there were multiple classes of elementary children involved, and they did indeed also carry pictures of Obama, Harriet Tubman, etc. If they needed one picture for each kid and had 60 or 80 kids, I could easily see some apathetic elementary teacher quickly exhausting the 30 or 40 possibilities that come to mind easily and starting to just pick famous black people. Of course, one would still expect them to know better than to pick Simpson...
Appalling as it is, I'm sure Blacks feel the same way when former slave masters are considered honorable heros, whom they're forced to learn about and admire.
Rosa Parks, George Washington Carver, Tiger Woods (oops) I mean Barack Obama. How hard was that? Really? How hard is it to google ``famous black people'' and eliminate suspected killers and drag queens?
The Founding Fathers, for all their faults, are the most important people in American history. And nobody is forced to admire them or consider them heroes. You can love or hate them all you want, but they clearly deserve a place in our textbooks and classrooms. Anyone who thinks that RuPaul, OJ and Dennis Rodman are as relevant to American history as the Founding Fathers is an idiot.
Man oh man, is this thread depressing or what. One time I told a joke on the work truck - back in the Clinton years, when Yugoslavia was breaking up. I got it from somewhere - the Onion? - anyway, the joke was that the US was airlifting vowels from I think Hawaii (where there was an oversupply) to Kosovo, so that the people in the former Yugoslavia could pronounce their children's names and so forth. Mildly funny, when told rather than described. I think I mentioned how much it cost. And then I listened to a twenty minute rant about how Clinton and the government had no business spending that kind of money on foreigners, who hated us anyway, when there were plenty of people who needed stuff right here in the US, and how Clinton was just doing that to take people's minds off his crimes and troubles, and how he just wanted to play the big shot overseas when he should be taking care of business at home. Kind of uncomfortable, that situation. More anonymous here, which is good.
