Token Outrage and “Oafish” Racists
The recent racism controversy over Donald Sterling prompted me to examine more on two Americas and ask, Where Is Outrage for Systemic Racism? To that question, I found a powerful and important response by Ta-Nehisi Coates: This Town Needs a Better Class of Racist. At the center of Coates’s piece is how token outrage allows the U.S. to simply ignore systemic racism: But style is the hero. Cliven Bu
Welcome to SC: A Heaping Stumbling-Bumbling Mess of Ineptitude
This is my 53rd year of living in South Carolina, the totality of my life. This is my 31st year as an educator in SC—18 years as a high school English teacher and 13 years now in higher education. My teaching career, coincidentally, began the exact year SC officially stepped into the accountability/standards/testing arms race that grew out of the early 1980s. Over the past 30 years, SC has created
5-1-14 the becoming radical | A Place for a Pedagogy of Kindness (the public and scholarly writing by P. L. Thomas, Furman University)
the becoming radical | A Place for a Pedagogy of Kindness (the public and scholarly writing by P. L. Thomas, Furman University): Revisiting James Baldwin’s “Black English”The first five or six years of teaching high school English have blurred in my memory, but certain days, certain events, and certain students remain vivid. One day in those years a young woman in my tenth-grade course blurted out