Monday, August 03, 2020

Yep, The Woke Won't Stop At Confederate Statues

Detroit, has  an unsurprising lack of confederate statues (attention woke folks who don't know their history - Michigan is in the North and on the Union side in the Civil War, neh?).  So what is a woke Detroiter supposed to do?

Well,  the progressives must proclaim the need to get down with the struggle, and for eradicating any name of anyone that has any association with slavery, regardless of their historical importance.

People Like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and more must be removed from the names of buildings per the progressive diktat. Yes, the very the founders of our country and of the freedom and  liberty these progs currently enjoy, reduced to their being nothing more than slaveholders, and therefore bad and in need of being removed.

Some educators are calling for these schools to be renamed, arguing that it’s wrong to ask students, especially those whose ancestors were enslaved, to attend school in a building that pays tribute to slave owners.

The legacies of historical figures including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison “are deeply rooted in the soil of racism and separatism,” a group of teachers at Cornerstone Schools, a network of charter schools in Detroit, wrote in a letter to the network’s CEO this month.

The teachers pointed out that the school names in question — Washington-Parks, Madison-Carver and Jefferson-Douglass academies — link slaveholders with the names of prominent Black Americans Rosa Parks, George Washington Carver, and Frederick Douglass. They noted that almost every student at Cornerstone schools is Black.

 Maybe figure out how to teach history in a sensitive way rather than sweeping it under the rug? Maybe understand that George Washignton, Jefferson and Madison are not solely defined by the fact that they owned slaves?  What happened to all that nuance that progressives proclaim that they have?

Or maybe, instead of caterwauling about the founding fathers and that hisotry isn't always a perfect tale with everyone and everything either 100% right or 100% wrong,, maybe work on teaching them to read history and since Detroit is about 47% functionally illiterate, you're doing one helluva bad job at that.

Renaming buildings when the students in them and 478% of those who graduate from them likely can't even read the names on the buildings is a bit of a waste of an effort best directed elsewhere to the problems of the here and now.

At least some alumni of Detroit institutions are pointing out changing the names are stupid - such as Cass Tech, perhaps the best high school in Detroit - named after Michigan's former governor before it became a state, Democrat, and someone who was not nice to American Indians and gasp, actually owned a slave before the Civil War.

“The kids are coming to get a great education,” said Monique Bryant, a member of the [Cass Tech Alumni] association and the founder of the Triangle Society, a nonprofit that supports the school and its students. “Nobody is thinking about Lewis Cass. I would think that any memory of Lewis Cass would be overshadowed by what the more than 80,000 alumni have been able to do.”
A rather enlightened attitude that makes sense rather than whitewashing history.

The teachers of Cornerstone Schools would be far better off spending their energy and time educating their students and maybe taking a history class or two rather than jumping on the simplistic year zero erase history bandwagon.

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