THIS ELECTION SEASON MAKES FOR PERFECT RACISM AND XENOPHOBIA LESSONS IN SCHOOLS

Feeling Rebloggy

As teachers and students return to classrooms this fall, together we have to try to make sense of a tumultuous presidential campaign and a summer of racial violence that have forcefully surfaced the racism that plagues our nation.

"Elementary and middle school students have grown up with an African American as president of the United States. This is a historic milestone. But these same students have also grown up in a nation that’s increasingly unequal, a country where police killed more Black people in 2015 than were lynched during the worst year of Jim Crow." ** 

In the past several months, students have watched Donald Trump use racist, Islamophobic, misogynist, and anti-immigrant vitriol to whip up a terrifying level of support, with ominous repercussions no matter who wins the election.

Read More and Get Source Materialshttp://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/31_01/edit311A.shtml


It's probably not true that the shootings now are worse than lynchings during Civil Rights. White people, including white researchers, tend to low ball their own tribe's genocidal tendencies. And I do tend to read higher lynching numbers when the researchers doing the research and writing the articles are people of color.

In my mind, it's very clear who has more reason to lie. 


So I think lynchings were likely severely underestimated by white researchers from 1863 to 1963 and beyond. And "estimating" is what you have to do because sometimes a black person was gifted more land than the white man next door and all of sudden the black person disappeared, never to be heard from again. More importantly, the ability to estimate improves as research methods improve. The lynching body count gets higher every time somebody does a sociological study.


By the way, in the 1970s and earlier most school children were taught in public schools that there were 1 million Native Americans here to be nearly wiped out by white people from western Europe. However, DNA evidence has showed us that there were more like 20 million Native Americans.

So, again, it's clear in my mind who has motive to lie the numbers down -- because they've been doing it all along.