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South Carolina high school English teacher Mary Wood was reprimanded last school year for teaching a lesson on race. She began teaching it again this year.

Mary Wood walked between the desks in her AP English Language and Composition classroom, handing out copies of the book she was already punished once for teaching.

Twenty-six students, all but two of them White, looked down at Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” a memoir that dissects what it means to be Black in America — and which drew calls for Wood’s firing when she tried to teach it last year in her mostly White, conservative town. Wood crossed to a lectern and placed her hands on either side of a turquoise notebook, open to two pages of bullet points explaining why she wanted to teach Coates’s work.

“That book that you guys have, it deals with racism,” she said on a recent Tuesday. “It’s going to be something with which you’re unfamiliar. That you need to spend time to research to fully understand.”

Wood stared at her class. She tried to make eye contact with every teenager. Anyone, she reminded herself, might be secretly recording her — or planning to report her.

…

Plus, both teachers believed the book, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is superbly written: a master class in the deployment of rhetorical devices. There was no better way to teach children how to formulate their own arguments, they thought.

“It teaches kids a different perspective, [it] teaches kids how to write well,” Wood said in an interview. And “it’s the right thing to do.”

  • Kaboom@reddthat.com
    670·
    10 months ago

    Oh fun. A book that says all white people are guilty of original sin racism and need to repent.

    She should be fired.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
      261·
      10 months ago

      You don’t have to give us the exact page, but can you please give us the chapter number of “Between the World and Me" which claims that all white people are guilty of racism and need to repent?

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
          221·
          10 months ago

          In other words, you have no idea if it actually says that. You’re just guessing based on whatever right-wing outrage about it you’re reading about on line.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
              181·
              10 months ago

              Weird, the word ‘guilt’ doesn’t appear on that page. In fact, that doesn’t in any way look like a summary that claims that all white people need to feel guilty and repent.

              Can you quote the section of the summary that you believe makes that claim?

                • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
                  171·
                  10 months ago

                  Please quote the part that is dog whistling. I already asked you for a quote. You do know how to copy and paste, don’t you?

                  • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
                    38·
                    10 months ago

                    He may not, but I do

                    He develops a belief system similar to that of Malcolm X and disagrees with the idea of non-violent protests.

                    He begins to think of Black people as “kings in exile,”

                    Coates finds himself unable to sympathize with the victims of the September 11 terrorist attack

                    Coates is confident that white America will continue to plunder not only Black bodies but the environment, too.

                    I haven’t read the book, but it all turns on whether the author agrees with the main character. That makes a huge difference in the tone and message of the book. It could be a story of an understandable reaction by a wronged man to the society who wronged him, and the process of illuminating how hatred breeds hatred. Or it could be a simple, preachy, moralizing, “all white men are bad” worthless piece of crap.