"Even a young student might observe, for example, a teacher who is afraid to punish a minority kid because they greatly fear being accused of racism, and intuit that as one of the levers they themselves can also use for power (getting their way) - consciously or not."
Again, I think you're vastly overestimating the power and influence tha…
"Even a young student might observe, for example, a teacher who is afraid to punish a minority kid because they greatly fear being accused of racism, and intuit that as one of the levers they themselves can also use for power (getting their way) - consciously or not."
Again, I think you're vastly overestimating the power and influence that minority kids can wield in this way.
For starters, the majority of these kids go to schools where their teachers are also people of colour. They don't get to play the racism card. Second, how often do you think this is effective even in cases where the teacher is white? I spend a great deal of time reading about this kind of stuff, and can only think of a handful of stories where a teacher has faced any consequences because of a student's accusation of racism in the past five years. This, out of what? Around 100,000 schools?
BLM's narrative wasn't embraced as a path to power. BLM *used* the narrative as a path to power (and mainly money). Absolutely. But the people who embraced it just swallowed the narrative because they lacked the critical thinking skills to see through it. A combination of news profiteering, social media engineering, and actual racism in policing, convinced millions of people, many of them white, that there was a genuine emergency. They truly believed tens of thousands of unarmed black people were being gunned down for sport.
Speaking of narratives, the narrative that black people in general gain from crying racism is pervasive, false, and is also pushed by people trying to gain power and influence. Ibram X Kendi and Nikole Hannah Jones and Robin DiAngelo do not represent the overwhelming majority of black people. And certainly not black kids. But I keep seeing people attribute their hucksterism far too broadly.
The narrative about endless racism certainly breeds hopelessness or apathy in some kids (as do the realities of their environment in some cases), but not a sense that there's power to be gained through it. In fact, the powerlessness that it breeds is one of the key reasons why I think it harms black people far more than "systemic racism" or other forms of interpersonal racism. And these latter two don't benefit black people either.
As Fryer and others have shown, when black kids are given opportunities and have high expectations placed on them, they work as hard and perform as well as anybody else. Even if they've previously been underperforming.
Very few people are dumb enough to believe that they're better off playing the victim than taking advantage of their opportunities. But some people are cynical or stupid enough to prevent them from getting those opportunities because they're busy debating whether saying "Grandfathered in" is racist.
"Even a young student might observe, for example, a teacher who is afraid to punish a minority kid because they greatly fear being accused of racism, and intuit that as one of the levers they themselves can also use for power (getting their way) - consciously or not."
Again, I think you're vastly overestimating the power and influence that minority kids can wield in this way.
For starters, the majority of these kids go to schools where their teachers are also people of colour. They don't get to play the racism card. Second, how often do you think this is effective even in cases where the teacher is white? I spend a great deal of time reading about this kind of stuff, and can only think of a handful of stories where a teacher has faced any consequences because of a student's accusation of racism in the past five years. This, out of what? Around 100,000 schools?
BLM's narrative wasn't embraced as a path to power. BLM *used* the narrative as a path to power (and mainly money). Absolutely. But the people who embraced it just swallowed the narrative because they lacked the critical thinking skills to see through it. A combination of news profiteering, social media engineering, and actual racism in policing, convinced millions of people, many of them white, that there was a genuine emergency. They truly believed tens of thousands of unarmed black people were being gunned down for sport.
Speaking of narratives, the narrative that black people in general gain from crying racism is pervasive, false, and is also pushed by people trying to gain power and influence. Ibram X Kendi and Nikole Hannah Jones and Robin DiAngelo do not represent the overwhelming majority of black people. And certainly not black kids. But I keep seeing people attribute their hucksterism far too broadly.
The narrative about endless racism certainly breeds hopelessness or apathy in some kids (as do the realities of their environment in some cases), but not a sense that there's power to be gained through it. In fact, the powerlessness that it breeds is one of the key reasons why I think it harms black people far more than "systemic racism" or other forms of interpersonal racism. And these latter two don't benefit black people either.
As Fryer and others have shown, when black kids are given opportunities and have high expectations placed on them, they work as hard and perform as well as anybody else. Even if they've previously been underperforming.
Very few people are dumb enough to believe that they're better off playing the victim than taking advantage of their opportunities. But some people are cynical or stupid enough to prevent them from getting those opportunities because they're busy debating whether saying "Grandfathered in" is racist.