arianamy edu

It’s possible that the producers were not, themselves, personally racist. This has no bearing whatsoever on anything. In America, racism is a default setting. To do nothing, to go along with the market, to claim innocence or neutrality, is to inevitably be a cog in the machine of racist hierarchy.

Our job is not to police the borders of allyship. Our job is to outreach, encourage, inform, and recruit. It’s not our job to tell people, “That was really problematic. Go educate yourself.“  Allies are supposed to be the people who *do* the education when marginalized people say, "I am too tired to help you understand this, please go ask somebody else.” And yelling at people about how they need to LEARN FASTER is not an educational strategy I’ve ever seen work.

The drama of education is always a narrative of transformation: Act I is life as we find it—the given, the known or the received, the settled or the agreed-upon orthodoxy, or the status quo. Act II is all the fireworks, the moments of upheaval and dissonance, the experiences of discovery and surprise, the energy of remodeling and refashioning. Act III is the achievement of new ways of knowing and behaving, expanded horizons and fresh possibilities.

The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he [sic, throughout] is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay a hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.