Posted on 07/30/2003 11:49:35 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
PONTEFICATIONS
TWO MORE SCHOOLS HAVE JUST BECOME BATTLEGROUNDS
in America’s culture war, both over issues of segregation and separatism.
In Oberlin, Ohio, southwest of Cleveland, activists are outraged that scheduling requirements assigned a white teacher to lead local high school classes in black history.
“The message is that we are not concerned about the importance of your historical background,” says A.G. Miller, an associate professor of American and “African religious history” – voodoo history? – at Leftily-trendy nearby Oberlin College, racially integrated from its opening day in 1833.
“When you talk about slavery, students need to understand it is not our fault,” said activist Phyllis Yarber Hogan of the Oberlin Black Alliance for Progress. “Our ancestors did nothing wrong to be enslaved. How do you work through that when the person teaching it is the same type of person who did the enslaving?”
Ms. Hogan clearly knows too little to teach black history. Whites sailed to Africa and purchased blacks who had already been turned into slaves by other Africans, both blacks and Arab Muslim slave traders.
Because an African who turned his neighbors into slaves one day could, himself, lose a fight and find himself in chains the next day, we do not know what percentage of today’s African-Americans descended from enslavers as well as slaves.
Nor can we confirm, because of the horrid pattern of rape during slavery, how many African-Americans carry within themselves the genes not only of Africa’s kings and queens but also the DNA of aristocratic white plantation slave owners. Millions of African-Americans are descended from the slave owners as well as from slaves.
By Ms. Hogan’s standard, therefore, neither whites nor blacks can be trusted to teach the history of slavery. This should be left to those whose ethnicity is from ancestors not involved in this issue – Polynesians, Asian-Americans, Jews.
Wait, strike that. Jews were held in bondage by black African Pharaohs in ancient Egypt – and could, as plausibly as anyone else as this column has argued, be demanding reparations along with three thousand years of compound interest from today’s African-Americans.
Is history the exclusive property of those groups that made and experienced it? If so, then should only Euro-Americans be allowed to teach the history of ancient Greece, Rome and European civilization? Racial separation for the goose is segregation for the gander, no?
As Adolf Hitler might have said, how can blacks understand or teach the grandeur of Western civilization? (Notice how ridiculous and racist this sounds when the arguments of the Oberlin activists are flipped upside-down?)
Or is the history of each human being’s achievement, courage and survival a legacy to be learned – and taught – by all of humankind? Call me prejudiced, but I believe that “black history,” like “white history,” should be the shared and precious heritage of all human beings.
At 2 Aster Place in New York City, a high school building is undergoing $3.2 million in renovations to serve 100 students this September and 170 students the following year.
This will be Harvey Milk High School, named for the gay San Francisco city supervisor assassinated in 1978. With two classrooms, it is to be the nation’s first public school exclusively for “gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students.”
New York City has high schools that emphasize particular skills. One, e.g., focuses on education about automobiles. Harvey Milk High, working in conjunction with the Hetrick-Martin Institute, will concentrate learning on math, literature, computer technology (using IBM-donated computers) and a culinary program. It will aim to send 95 percent of its students on to college.
Harvey Milk High was developed, its supporters say, to provide a safe haven where students with minority sexual orientations could be themselves without being ridiculed or picked on by conventional heterosexual kids.
Critics such as New York State Conservative Party Chairman Mike Long has asked: “What next? Maybe we should have schools for chubby kids who get picked on. Maybe all kids who wear glasses should have special schools….Is there a different way to teach homosexuals? Is there gay math? … There’s no reason these children should be treated separately.”
Liberals used to advocate school integration as the path to social understanding and mutual respect. Now many Leftists instead want segregation, separating “black history” from “white history” and straight kids from gender minorities, who in their own separate-but-equal schools can study a curriculum emphasizing “gay pride” – and learn to think of themselves as a Balkanized nation radically hardened and separated from the American melting pot.
Reading about the huge expenditure and effort to make Harvey Milk High equipped to provide excellent education, I found my head filled with odd questions.
What could prevent liberal parents from claiming that their heterosexual child was gay, just to get a place in this fast-tracked, prestigious school? How would a child “prove” that he was gay or she was lesbian? What if a child changed and chose a heterosexual path and lifestyle….would that lead to ejection from Harvey Milk High?
And what about the teachers? Using the Oberlin High School precedent, surely we could not expect heterosexual teachers to lead classes of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students. But how, without gender discrimination, can New York City recruit only sexual minority teachers – and what must they do to prove their sexual bona fides?
Some might argue that gay males are so different from lesbians that each should be segregated into classes that have a teacher intimately familiar with what each orientation experiences. Thus can the Left Balkanize America into smaller and smaller interest groups, each pitted against the rest.
But perhaps lesbians would be the best teachers of gay male classes. Gay scoutmasters could be excellent, I bemusedly have argued, as long as Boy Scout troops are led by lesbian scoutmistresses and Girl Scout troops are led by gay males with no predatory interest in young girls.In the immortal words of Rodney King, can’t we all just get along? Wasn’t a large purpose of the civil rights movement to end the power of segregationist social engineers? Why is segregation not just back, but multiplying in ways it never before existed?
Oh my gosh. There is no reasoning with her.
Curiously enough, another angle to the "gay public school" hit me today. I'm sure the Leftists already thought this one through...
Picture this: If the draft were reinstated, all a yellow-bellied mealy-mouthed Leftist would have to do to get out of it would be to enroll in their senior year at Harvey Milk High School. Just having alumni status there would get 'em a 4F, I imagine.
-Jay
-PJ
1. Homeschool
2. A good private school
3. A combination of homeschooling/private school
But...but...then a child would have such an uncluttered mind that they would actually be able to think and learn! THEN they would have to take a class on fitting into society!/sarcasm
You are using an affirmative action calculator!
I thought it was "Million Man Math".
LOL! Read "Pride and Prejudice".
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