I can't fucking believe I actually read this.
So what counts as racism at Rye Country Day? The Instagram posts to the Black@rcds page range from trivial to inane to preposterous. One student lamented that a white friend had observed, “The [students-of-color] end of year party… was discriminatory because it ‘left out white people.’” As if this were the most absurd observation you could make. Another student, who was Colombian, felt “trapped” when a peer described himself as “richer than a Colombian drug lord.” One girl was upset because her peers, upon learning she was Jamaican, told her about vacationing in Jamaica and getting their hair braided there. She wasn’t from that part of Jamaica.
How that shit not racist and marginalizing?
Some of the complaints are hilariously vague: After 14 years at the school, one young woman was “so sad to leave,” but since then she has realized “how toxic life was as a BLACK FEMALE at RCDS.” She notes, “I had a majority white friends all my time at RCDS and hardly had a problem with any of them. However maybe it was me just trying to fit in with my white peers by keeping my head down.” Maybe, or maybe the 14 years were perfectly fine, and only now that everyone is crying racism did she feel the need to complain.
Ah, yes, realizing in your late teens that you've had to pretend to be someone that isn't you to fit in and you've suppressed everything that goes along with it is totally not a problem. It's definitely not a problem that black kids feel forced to act white to fit in.
One poster claims that a good friend got into “neo-Nazi culture” and then called this person the N-word in front of his mother, who only lightly chastised him.
Rich kids at a prestigious private school totally don't have any societal factors influencing their development and causing racist tendencies. Nope, not conceivable
Oh, word? There's no fucking claims over years and years of this shit happening at private schools? There aren't incidents of them punishing teachers who call out students wearing fucking blackface?
A parent at another local prep school told me her daughter had to attend an all-grade meeting because one student uttered the N-word to another student while singing a rap song. If you are a teenager looking for the wrong kind of attention, there is literally no more effective way to get it than to whisper a racial slur.
Yeah, trying to teach kids that using racial slurs is awful is a shitty practice.
By the end of his first month there, my sixth-grade son found himself subject to a lecture on the dangers of “microaggressions.” He learned it was offensive to assume that just because someone was wearing a dress, he/she was a female. He learned it was offensive to say one group of kids achieved a solution to a math problem faster because they “had an Asian kid” working with them. Over the course of the year, there were no fewer than half a dozen similar talks.
Yeah, trying to teach kids not to stereotype and make gender assumptions is so fucking awful
It is impossible to predict what will offend someone, I explained, so we should do our best to be kind. And if we inadvertently insult someone, we should apologize. But these basic lessons about how to treat others seemed to be missing.
Lmao, teaching kids to not use racial slurs and repeat stereotypes isn't teaching them how to treat others?
A few months into the year, the boys in his grade were made to sit out of multiple gym classes because of “bullying” in the locker room. These incidents did not seem to have anything to do with race, but just involved repeated verbal and sometimes physical confrontations. It was the kind of stuff that the adults at the school I attended would have placed under the umbrella of “boys will be boys.” But it is also the kind of behavior that would have been met with clear punishment. Students were supposed to “achieve the honorable” at the prep school I attended. And those who behaved less than honorably would be assigned tasks such as cleaning up the campus on a Saturday morning
Yeah, punitive measures are so much better than focusing on fixing the actual issues. Our prison system has definitely proven that
Yeah, because being racist, sexist, and homophobic is perfectly fine adult behavior.
the KIPP academy network of charter schools announced that it is “retiring ‘Work hard. Be nice’ as KIPP’s national slogan.” Why? Because it “diminishes the significant effort required to dismantle systemic racism, places value on being compliant and submissive, supports the illusion of meritocracy, and does not align with our vision of students being free to create the future they want.”
Working hard and being nice may not be the only things schools should require of students, but they do seem like the bare minimum. Asking 11-year-olds to focus instead on combating systemic racism and creating the future they want seems both unrealistic and unhelpful when teaching them to navigate individual relationships with their peers.
Holey fucc. What the fuck? Yeah, teaching kids at a young age that there are systemic mechanisms of oppression and they should be cognizant of them and how they can diminish them is awful. Teaching them to not be racist doesn't teach them how to navigate relationships with their peers.
HOW THE FUCK IS TEACHING THEM NOT TO OPPRESS OTHERS NOT BUILDING CHARACTER? WHAT THE FUCK?
On Friday, January 17, Middle and Upper School students will hear from Khalil A. Cumberbatch, a nationally-recognized formerly incarcerated advocate for criminal justice and immigration policy change. Khalil currently serves as Chief Strategist at New Yorkers United for Justice. He has worked within the reentry community in NYC since 2010 when he was released after serving almost seven years in the NYS prison system.
Though the details are hard to find online—court records use his middle name—the specifics of Cumberbatch’s crime are worth knowing. Twenty years old at the time, he and two friends robbed two women at gunpoint on the Upper East Side. Found guilty of first-degree robbery, assault, and weapons possession, he was released on bail before his sentencing hearing and then fled the state. He was picked up by law enforcement in Virginia with stolen goods and a stolen license plate. When he was stopped, he gave police a false name. Upon returning to New York, he claimed he had been accompanying a friend for medical treatment, but the note from the doctor to this effect turned out to be a forgery.
A few years after being released, Cumberbatch, who was an illegal immigrant, was going to be deported. Governor Andrew Cuomo, impressed with his college degree and community service, pardoned him and cleared the way for him to stay. Everyone loves a good story about redemption, but was bringing in a convicted felon to talk about bail reform the best way to honor the legacy of Martin Luther King?
Are you fucking kidding me? Who else is better to teach kids about criminal justice reform than someone who's experienced the horrors of our prison system?
They noted that the students at RCDS are very good at challenging the views of speakers. When we said we thought leaving it to middle-schoolers to argue publicly with honored adult visitors seemed like a recipe for a lopsided debate, they assured us it would be fine and that they brought in adults with a wide variety of viewpoints. Perhaps we hadn’t been at the school long enough to test this theory, but I would bet a year’s worth of tuition that there will be no speaker invited to argue against bail reform.
BREAKING NEWS: PTA Wine Mom Thinks Our Bail System Is Fair and Doesn't Fuck Over the Poor
By this point in the 2019–20 school year, the students had already absorbed plenty of lessons about race during their classes. The only books my son read in English class were about civil rights or, in one case, the plight of Mexican immigrants. My daughter’s history teacher used Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States to supplement his regular history textbook to study more about the evils of colonialism
And?
A ll of the racialization only continued. During the final weeks of school—which by that point was being conducted online—we received multiple missives from the administration expressing contrition for the school’s environment. “Today, I write to say: I am deeply sorry,” the headmaster emailed. “The RCDS educational experience can and should be more actively anti-racist, more inclusive, and more culturally responsive, and while efforts have been made, results have been insufficient.”
Students were encouraged to share their pain with counselors and diversity administrators. And for the final days of school, they were told they could change their screen background (used for their classes over Zoom) into a Black Lives Matter fist. Previously, they had been allowed to use either an RCDS logo or no background at all because it could be distracting. But distractions from academics are of little importance when social justice is at stake.
Jesus fucking Christ: cops kill a man with impunity, there are protests across the country, the cops are beating and teargassing peaceful protestors, and the school isn't supposed to acknowledge that?
the experience of being the mother of mixed-race kids has only confirmed to me that we are fortunate to live in the most tolerant, open-minded country in the world. There are parents at our synagogue, our schools, and in our neighborhood who have welcomed my children into their homes, who have fed them and cared for them, and who have treated them like family.
Ah, yes, her experience with her friends is totally indicative that racism isn't in an issue in the US. Just ignore the prison statistics
Yeah, ignoring race and how it is used to imprison and impoverish swathes of black people is totally the solution. Just ignore the systemic oppression and it'll go away
So, rich PTA wine moms suck and are racist shitheads. Asoul is a racist. @LuckyArtist any other conclusions to be drawn from this that I missed?