Sublime
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The fact is, “exceptional Negroes” have always been a staple of an apartheid-like educational system that separates the “gifted” from the “normal,” and both from the “naughty” or “underachieving.” Sticks and stones will only break my bones, but words can lift or crush me.
Ruha Benjamin • Imagination: A Manifesto (A Norton Short)
Paradoxically, many of these disciplinary policies are akin to the progressive vision espoused by eugenicists like Karl Pearson, justifying harsh discipline as a means to “close academic disparities.” Schooling becomes standardized testing without creative expression, arbitrary rules without room to breathe, Black Excellence without Black Joy.
Ruha Benjamin • Imagination: A Manifesto (A Norton Short)
nytimes.com
nytimes.comThey lose attention because many of their teachers have lost attention, shed it in the heat of a formation that narrowed intellectual excellence down to one kind of performance, one kind of white body-mind.
Willie James Jennings • After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Theological Education between the Times (TEBT))
how Blackness is selectively celebrated (and contained) within the white imagination.
Ruha Benjamin • Imagination: A Manifesto (A Norton Short)
W. E. B. Du Bois taught us this, and we teach it to our students. Whiteness was offered as a promise. Precarity makes it less sturdy. There are White people who work hard all of their lives and Whiteness gives them little materially. On the other hand, there are White people who come from powerful edifices, who can point to paintings on
... See moreImani Perry • South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
ideas argue that racist policies are the cause