Friday, June 19, 2015

White Values

From June 17, 2015 National Review:
Oregon’s Gresham-Barlow school district spends $100,000 each year on a white-privilege conference that teaches its faculty that they’re racist and should therefore blame themselves for student misbehavior. The week-long “Coaching for Educational Equity” conference is mandatory for all administrators (and optional for teachers) in the Portland-area K–12 school district each year, according to the Education Action Group Foundation, a national non-partisan, non-profit education reform organization headquartered in Michigan. 

EAG reports that school-board member Dan Chriestenson recently obtained the conference materials after a long battle with the Oregon Center for Educational Equity, the private nonprofit that presents the conference. 
 “Many white people in Oregon have no idea that our schools and state are immersed in white culture and are uncomfortable and harmful to our students of color, while also reinforcing the dominant nature of white culture in our white students and families,” one of the conference documents explains. 
The manual defines this “white culture” with a list of values, such as “promoting independence, self expression, personal choice, individual thinking and achievement,” because apparently those are strictly “white” concepts and not emphasized in black communities. 
The training instructs participants to stop “blaming when students don’t meet standards” and instead start “examining our beliefs and practices when students don’t meet standards.” It advises faculty to avoid “controlling or teaching discipline to students” and to instead think about “changing school practices that alienate students and lead to disruptions.”

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/oregon-white-privilege-100K
 The murderer in South Carolina must have attended that conference.

2 comments:

  1. When I was in High School in Pendleton, Oregon ("World's Round-Up City", home of the annual Pendleton Round-up Rodeo), there was ONE black student in High School my Senior Year. Which was, admittedly, over 50 years ago.

    That one student could get away with everything. He was the class cut-up. Frankly, we found him to be "exotic". (Note that the one student of Romany descent enjoyed the same favor, but then she had huge mammaries when she was 13, to the boys loved her but the girls ... not so much; they were jealous.)

    There was one Mexican guy, but he dropped out. Nobody ever knew what happened to him.

    We didn't have a lot of minority groups, back then, and I didn't spend a lot of time in the Major Metropolitan Area (Portland) so I can only speak to my own small-town experience.

    The point is, Oregon is a "Small Town" state. We have a lot of farmers and rangers who have a lot of land, but they reside in the 90% of the counties where minorities are usually agricultural workers, and most often migratory.

    Back then, it would be fair to say that people in Oregon, may not have known that People of Color were "different", except that they looked different. We didn't know how to treat them, so we treated them as their actions deserved. Those who were violent, we avoided. Those who were "just folks", that's how we treated them. White kids didn't get spoon-fed racial antagonisms by their parents. When I was 15, I started working in the Summer agricultural jobs and worked alongside ... whomever.

    We just didn't care about Race Issues. There were no races; there were no issues. There was just working at whatever job you can find.

    Today, I discover that Oregonians need to be taught that they enjoy "White Privilege".

    I do SO wish I had known that back in the 1960's! I could have used a break from the back-breaking labor, the 10-hour days in the fields "Rogueing" the Pea crops, driving trucks, and especially when I was running Caterpillar tractors over the discharge pits from the Pea-vining machines. (Note: rotting Pea vines smell like a combination of Shit and Piss after they have spent a day or two in the hot summer sun .. and we spend ALL DAY there for months on end.)

    Sad to hear that Oregon has become so clue-less that nowdays people don't know people when we see them.

    I would wager that difficult, distasteful, distgustiong summer harvest jobs in Oregon are still shared equally among "white" and "colored" harvest workers. Except, perhaps, that the migrants resent that poor white Oregon kids still line up at the farmer's "hiring door" competing for for the minimum wage jobs.

    (BTW .. when I was working summer harvest, Minimum Wage was Eighty-Five Cents per hour, although when it jumped to One Dollar an Hour there were some small landowners who lost their farms.)

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  2. I lost your blog for a few months and am glad to find it again. I'm sure that kid in Charleston is schizophrenic but the story is just too good for the media to consider that aspect. They finally figured out the shooter in Tucson was psychotic and the story vanished. I wonder if this one will also vanish once the facts come out.

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