Yes, the lowly peanut butter and jelly sandwich is no longer on the list of non-racist foods. Supposedly, because people in places like Somalia don’t eat them, they are a universal symbol of “white privilege.”
So is there any food that everyone in the world has access to? I thought maybe rice. But if you don’t have a pot and water to cook it . . . *no rice for you! *That pretty much leaves dirt and twigs . . . except it leaves out people who live, say, north of the Arctic Circle. So any time you eat any kind of food, you’re a racist.
Jeez. I can’t believe these are the people we entrust to teach our children. Why does the education career path seem to attract the crazies and the continually “offended”?
As I read the article, the school is suggesting not that a PB&J sandwich is “racist” but that it’s not part of everyone’s culture. Supposedly, there was an SAT question something like this:
Runner is to marathon as oarsman is to [multiple choices]. The correct answer was regatta, but that assumes a level of familiarity with rowing terms, which some inner-city or rural kids might lack.
Nor do most suburban kids, I imagine, have much experience with regattas.
But as I read the article, the objection to the PB&J was not its use as a test question, but simply its inclusion in a lesson as an example of some kind. Are you defending the objection to mentioning a PB&J sandwich in that context?
Uh, my kids’ middle-class town, racially and economically diverse high school had a crew team and went to regattas, so I don’t think your assumption is accurate. There are a fair number of high schools with rowing teams. Plus exposure to these things can also come from literature, movies etc.
I think it is fair, especially in ethnically diverse areas, to include classroom work that reflects things that is part of the local culture. For little kids, it helps when learning something new to build on what is already familiar.
Just because your middle-class high school on the North Shore of Long Island has a crew team does not mean that such things are common throughout the US.
My kids didn’t go to only to high school on LI, we just moved this year. My son spent 9-11th grade at a urban high school is another state in an economically very diverse town (as in, high percentage of free/reduced lunch, which how they categorize the economic group of schools).
But even that’s my point. So what if their HS was on the North Shore of LI? The poster I was responding to was making a globalization about who would or wouldn’t be exposed to the term “regatta”. Only Ivy league college kids. I was showing that his over-generalization wasn’t accurate- not that mine was. Mine was a couner point.
That’s ok. I’m sure it is. But like I said- that’s ok, too. The point was that even economically less advantaged kids may know about regattas.
However, even though it looks like I’m contradicting the point of the thread, I do agree that being more culturally inclusive in school and aware of the assumptions teachers make (especially when they are part of the dominant culture) is not a bad thing.
Cultural bias is a huge problem in academic testing. As with the above example, the questions tend to be composed for a largely white, middle to upper class viewpoint. No, not every high schooler would necessarily know what an oarsman or regatta was, and it’s easy to craft questions that incorporate such pitfalls.
I agree. And I get the impression that despite the spin being put on the story, the teacher or administrator wasn’t calling peanut butter racist, but just pointing out that it’s outside the culture of some of their students.
