The Delights of Teaching
One of my favorite books to teach at Wabash College, where I worked for ten years before moving to Lincoln, was the inimitable Beverly Daniel Tatum's Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? I love this book. I loved teaching it to first-year writing students, not only because Tatum's writing is wonderfully logical, organized, and crystal-clear--a great model for students--but also, and more importantly, because she explains issues of institutional (structural) racism and white privilege in ways that anyone can understand. It made me feel happy to be doing peace and justice work in the composition classroom, instead of talking only about paragraph organization and comma splices.
My father loved the book, too. I gave him a copy and told him how excited I'd been to find it (at the GLCA Course Design & Teaching Workshop for multicultural education, which I'd taken as a junior faculty member). He read it and was annotating it; he told me that it clarified things that had puzzled and hurt him all his life. I found it on his little stand next to his armchair after he died.
One of my favorite students at Wabash, a young man named Daniel Zeno, who's now in law school at the University of Iowa, just wrote to update his friends on the work that he's been doing this summer with Advancement Project, a policy, communications, and legal action group in D.C. that works for racial justice. Along with several other initiatives, Daniel has written a blog post for the Advancement Project's blog, Just Democracy, called "Undelivered Promises: 40 Acres and a Mule in 2008," about the new suit filed by over 800 Black farmers against the USDA.
He writes:
Go, Daniel!
My father loved the book, too. I gave him a copy and told him how excited I'd been to find it (at the GLCA Course Design & Teaching Workshop for multicultural education, which I'd taken as a junior faculty member). He read it and was annotating it; he told me that it clarified things that had puzzled and hurt him all his life. I found it on his little stand next to his armchair after he died.
One of my favorite students at Wabash, a young man named Daniel Zeno, who's now in law school at the University of Iowa, just wrote to update his friends on the work that he's been doing this summer with Advancement Project, a policy, communications, and legal action group in D.C. that works for racial justice. Along with several other initiatives, Daniel has written a blog post for the Advancement Project's blog, Just Democracy, called "Undelivered Promises: 40 Acres and a Mule in 2008," about the new suit filed by over 800 Black farmers against the USDA.
He writes:
The persistent unwillingness of the USDA to address these problems of racism and discrimination, combined with the many other examples on the federal, state and local government level (Did somebody say Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans?) remind us all that structural racism is still alive. Structural racism is a direct result of a history of racism in the United States and continues to deny people of color equal opportunities.
Go, Daniel!
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