Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Politics in Black and White

Have you read this? Go read it. It's short.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks so much for this link.

Last year, I took the UW's required "Ethnic Literature of the United States" class and discovered that my dated knowledge and understanding of racial issues were glaringly ethnocentric in almost every area. I was ashamed. Looking back, even the title of the class is offensive to me now. Someone needs to restructure American Literature curriculum from K to college.....

But since falling in love with James Baldwin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Louise Erdrich and many others, I am encouraged. Their writing is now assigned to my two teens for reading projects, and we also participate in our campus "Students Opposed to Acts of Prejudice" (SOAP) acitivities. It isn't easy in the rural Midwest to find opportunities to educate on these and other subjects, but hopefully their generation will do better than mine in the areas of social awareness and social responsibility.

Our national culture and community desperately need a refreshed education in these areas of racial injustice and inequality - and insightful, thoughtful, masterful writers with a commitment to that end - have always been and will always be the inspiration for such scholarship....hmmm.