I watched DaySide yesterday as I ate lunch. I often have the TV on during lunch, but I don’t always “hear” it as I usually read the paper at lunch, too. Yesterday it was almost impossible to avoid hearing it.
The DaySide blurb from yesterday included:
And, should white teachers be allowed to teach black history? We’ll ask Leo Terrell, civil rights attorney, and John McWhorter, author of Losing the Race.
Leo Terrell is a bigot of the first water. I don’t care what his experiences were as a black man in this country; in fact, Counselor, I think you doth protest too much. Screaming and yelling and groaning while Professor McWhorter — a man for whom I have a great deal of respect — is calmly demolishing your points is boorish and rude.
And all over whether or not a white person is qualified to teach black history.
Hell, I’m a history major. If I’d written my thesis I’d have an MA in American History. I spent a lot of time working on Japanese history as a sideline to my primary interest, which was Japanese-American relations in the interwar years. Are you telling me, Counselor, that I’m incompetent to teach Japanese history because I’m not Japanese? Or that I can’t teach about Japanese internments in the US during WWII because I didn’t experience them? Boku wa baka desu.
Counselor, did you yourself experience slavery? (Of course you didn’t. You weren’t even a gleam in your grandmother’s eye when slavery ended in this country.) So how do you suppose, by your lights, that you are competent to teach black history — more especially the history of black slavery in America — prior to your birth?
What about people who teach Roman or Greek history? That was two thousand years ago, what possible experiential knowledge can these people have of their subject? How about ancient Chinese history?
Special pleading for black history to be taught only by black teachers because only black teachers can possibly understand the “reality” of black history just makes me sit up and say, “Excuse me, but my bogometer just pegged.”