I would also say that this issue is not only in the educational realm, these issues also apply to the workforce.
Class Trouble
12 February 2020
We see these are making it around Facebook, so we’re going ahead and putting them here too. If you really enjoyed them and want high resolution copies, consider visiting our website to purchase and support our writing at: https://classtrouble.club/…/digital-downloads-pdf…
Here’s our original caption:
Academia has an aversion to language that precisely names oppression. Maybe it’s because it is largely controlled by wealthy, conservative white men (84 percent of full-time college professors are white and 60 percent of those are men). The stats for elementary and high school teachers isn’t better ― 80 percent white.
Where white people don’t dominate totally, academia is still full of liberals who too often trade accurately naming oppression for institutional clout. In this Eurocentric, male, and capitalist education system, radical BI&POC are left in a constant cycle of learning “new” language to describe problems we’ve lived through and named for generations.
But we think it is important to push back against the palatable renaming of our oppression. So today, we wanted to cut through the bullshit. In the traditions of Black, Brown, and Indigenous radical thought, we will say aloud the names of our oppression when we see it or experience it: We will say this is white supremacy; this is anti-Blackness; this is cishetero patriarchy; this is ableism; this is empire.
We start with Vol. I of our “Guide to Coded Language in Education.” This series is meant to sift through some of the jargon we hear in education spaces. It is a work in progress. If any of these slides feel unclear, if you would like to see more writing on a topic, please post below and tell us. There is only so much we can convey in a single slide on Instragram and we welcome the need to bring more nuance to this discussion.
We also invite you to share below some words or phrases that you’ve experienced which decenter naming how a system of oppression shows up in education.
As always, thank you for reading. Love and power.