Again, it’s really NOT rocket science…
13 Likes
Trout was asking her to solve this problem.
We know the systems she works in is institutionally racist, and that individuals alone can’t solve that. She must be intellectually aware of that issue. But making racist comments about your students does not help in addressing that larger issue.
It seems to me that @DukeTrout was addressing that issue and saying that she’s perpetuating that issue by her comments. Adjunct or not, it’s still her job to help students, not level racist vile at them.
13 Likes
Try NOT putting words in other people’s mouths, and actually LISTENING to what’s being said.
8 Likes
The problem with analyzing education as kind of Marxist “means of production” situation is that if the faculty is the proletariat, then the students are just objects, they’re the commodities being produced
which may not be the best take here
15 Likes
Yeah… willfully dehumanizing others is never a good look; it’s rather a core component of racism itself.
14 Likes
Bigots/Racists are not fond of alternate models nor alternate modes of thinking/methods/theories, it is incumbent of them to be static/stuck in the path of life. I submit that this type of individual should not be a teacher/professor/educator. They are the quintessential opposite of the job they are paid to do, unqualified, and incompetent.
Truly sad that those seeking educational/higher learning are subject to this treatment.
6 Likes
There is an argument to be made about the proletarianization of the academic labor force and that the current corporatization of academia is indeed commodifying education. I’d argue it’s not the student being reduced to a commodity, but the education itself that is being commoditized.
But either way, the institution did not put words into her mouth. The problem is not her worrying about her failing students, which is commendable and all profs who aren’t jerks are concerned with. It’s very much her focus on Black students only and assuming that the problems they face is because of their race, rather than any number of factors facing many students, regardless of race.
12 Likes
It occurs to me a lot of posts here, some removed, have basically been arguing that it’s not racist if you ignore the fact that she mentioned black people.
12 Likes
If you want students humanized, you need to create an institution that does not relegate their education to the least-paid person and least-secure position in organization.
2 Likes
well obviously the least paid and least secure people are the students
3 Likes
Again, most of us manage to NOT say racist things about our students, though we are the in least-paid and least-secured positions. The problem is what SHE said. Full stop.
15 Likes
Solving racism? I’m sorry that’s what you got from what I wrote.
What I meant was that, from my experience with educators in my immediate family, they seek to continuously improve their educational content and methods to make sure that as many students are excelling in their classes as possible. The fact that this prof said “this group of students do poorly in my classes.” and then blamed the students for it is the piss topping on the shit sandwich of their racism.
I missed this comment as I was scrolling earlier:
That’s a huge unsupported assumption there. In combination with your comments about affirmative action, you are rapidly treading the same path of the commenter who had all their posts removed from this thread.
12 Likes
Newsflash; they already ARE ‘humanized,’ inherently.
Only people seeking to strip others of their humanity are the ones performing in an active tense.
16 Likes
I considered writing about this earlier in the thread, but its a tricky topic.
I’ve taught college students. There was one clear case of student performance splitting on racial lines that “drove me crazy”
I taught at LSU; Louisiana has a long, horrible history of institutionalized racism. LSU was once whites only, and then Southern University was built to be the Black college. Southern’s campus was originally going to be built next to LSU, but to prevent that the area around LSU was made undevelopable by creating a series of man-made lakes. The schools have never recieved nearly equal investment, nor have the schools their students were previously educated in. Both schools are integrated now, but only somewhat – 90% of Southern students are Black, while 12% of LSU students are.
In my 20s I taught an advanced physiology lab that had a reputation at the local med schools. They specifically checked if applicants took the course and how they did. Southern didn’t offer an equivalent course, but Southern students that wanted to go to med school could take advantage of an exchange offer to come to LSU for the course. The Southern students never did as well, which is inseperable from the institutional racism in transportation and education.
First the campuses aren’t next to each other and there is no good public transportation between them, making coming to class more difficult and just popping in to ask the teacher a question impossible. Southern students would have to spend ~45 minutes on buses (each way) to come to campus; the LSU students were in the biology building every day. The schools do not have equal lab facilities, and the amount of lab training in the first 3 years of college was much different. Southern students also assumed that the LSU teachers weren’t willing to put in any extra time to help them (it wasn’t an uninformed assumption, most wouldn’t).
The end result was that med schools held it against Southern students if they didn’t take the course. If they did take the course, that they didn’t do as well was held against them. The discrepancy drove me crazy, and while I have regrets about not making more of an effort to meet with students outside of class, in the end my conclusion is inline with Harriot’s thread posted above. The investment has to be made in the same facilities and classes at Southern and all of the public schools in the surrounding communities (which are now more segregated than they were 50 years ago). While I should have done more to be a better teacher there, that kind of misses the point. Having Southern students’ acceptance to med school be at all dependent on the disposition of a white guy (who was still a grad student) at LSU, is an indication of a deeply broken system
25 Likes
THAT is the problem. There is systemic bias but it’s so damn pervasive there is probably very little she can do to address income inequality, housing inequality, education inequality etc
Assuming no deliberate racism on the profs part, and she’s holding all students to the same standards (also reasonable to assume) then what we’re really seeing is how that systemic racism has a long term, far reaching effect on these under-prepared student’s lives, AND which resonates down the line (fewer professional PoC, less representation in the system, fewer role models, etc) perpetuating that system.
1 Like
But again, she’s in full control over her WORDS. She merely singled out a particular group for failing her class. She doesn’t address any of that at all.
She says “a lot of my lower ones are Blacks”… not the “Blacks” there. This is not addressing the root causes of educational inequality, it’s merely stating that “the Blacks” do worse in her classes.
15 Likes
Yep. I learned, a long time ago, that a bigot who admits there are “exceptions” is not showing a glimmer of anything. They are saying “those exceptions are the ones I am deliberately not thinking about when I talk about [category of people]. They are outside the data pool because they do not fit my ideas”.
8 Likes
Seems like handy synonym for “I’m not racist but” and “just sayin” 
9 Likes
I can imagine a professor saying, “I’m having this problem where a disproportionate number of my poorly performing students are African American. I’m not sure if this reflects some unconscious bias on my part or if there is something culturally biased in the coursework itself but I’d like some help addressing the issue.” and not feeling like the professor needed to leave.
This is not what she said.
12 Likes
