*Put Something Meaningful Here. Someday*

You start to wonder why in every fiction that reaches us, EVEN IN FICTION WRITTEN HERE, jungles and deserts are considered "exotic" and "hostile" and are never home to any main characters, why they're always "exotic", never "home". You start hearing people who wish they had snow in Christmas (which is in summer) and you realize that's nonsense but it takes a bit of thinking to properly articulate WHY is that nonsense. You see city planning bringing plant species from the north which don't grow here, people trying to imitate northern climates where it just doesn't work, and you think that's silly, until you start learning about how these are just the tail of actual plans of transforming colonized enviroments. You hear comments about how people in hot places are such and such and you of course realize that's discrimination and racism, but you also start to connect the dots about how the discrimination goes against the very place they live in.

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.