Facetious? This is a direct quote from a mandatory sensitivity training I attended. And I doubt I’m the only one whose been told this.
Violators are subject to a no-defense tribunal where their guilt has already been assumed, to set punishment according to how contrite they appear, and the level of victimhood they themselves can claim based on their own race, sex, gender, etc. (and also based on the quality of the tribunal member’s sleep and breakfast, regularity of orgasms and bowel function, etc.)
Not a personal encounter but “frequently wrong” triggered a memory.
It came from one of the editors of the campus newspaper from my alma mater. It was in the period between the peak talk about divestiture and the final death of Apartheid. It was a popular issue on campus. It got a good chunk of coverage in the world news section and editorials. He didn’t challenge that. He did have the temerity to question the use of “African-American” and “minority” to describe the repressed group that was neither American nor a demographic minority. He just wanted to have an editorial discussion about whether there was better wording for their coverage to factually express the reality.
I feel the need to weigh in on the Great Peanut Butter Sandwich Controversy.
If you don’t know what a PB&J sandwich is then just get the fuck out of the country. Pack up your shit. Head to the nearest border. There’s one conveniently located to the South and to the North of the US. Get going.
Or, alternatively, you could assimilate into our society. It doesn’t have to be all at once, but take small steps every day. Learn the language. Go to a football game, which by the way isn’t soccer. Eat a hog dog. Listen to shitty American pop music. Wear American clothes. Also, yes, figure out what a sandwich is.
That’s what the fucking sandwich is about. People who come to live and learn in America shouldn’t have to be protected and insulated from American culture. They should be absorbed in it. If I went to a new country, I wouldn’t expect them to bend over backwards to accommodate me. I’d expect to have to learn a lot of new things.
The whole notion of a PB&J reference being inappropriate in a classroom lesson is just completely dumb. Anyone who doesn’t get this is so far gone that they are living in an imaginary PC la-la land.
I used to do university admissions and the application form did have “African-American”, which used to annoy the actual African applicants (and indeed black applicants from anywhere else outside America). Later they covered the bases with “Black/African-American”.
That said, apparently some years earlier the university had attempted to avoid racial bias in processing applications by not asking about race - and then got fined because it couldn’t demonstrate it hadn’t been discriminating by race since it didn’t have any data on the race of its applicants. Some days you just can’t win.
I have a theory. You think “that’s what the fucking sandwich is about” because of two, and only two things:
First, and most importantly, like Furious George and doorhinge, you’ve turned your brain off on the subject and made yourself into a fucking conditional moron. (With doorhinge, that condition includes almost every subject, but his congenital tragedy doesn’t separate you and FG from the category.)
Second, you’re fearful that the purity of your dominant subculture is under attack, that the mandated inclusion of other cultural, ethnic or religious experiences and the assertion of value and importance in those experiences is a threat to the continued privilege enjoyed by your subset of humanity.
And you’re right to envision that loss of privilege and dominance; its disappearance is inevitable, and good fucking riddance to it. But you have to make up and then do battle against little fantasy constructs that were never put forward by your targets -strawmen like “[the] notion of a PB&J reference being inappropriate in a classroom lesson” and your idea that the teachers or students want to avoid integration into the country rather than advance it more effectively. You need to torch those straw arguments because it so painfully stretches your underutilized empathy and so stings your over-inflated sense of entitlement to conceptualize the ideas behind the actual arguments long enough to deal with them on a rational basis.
I’m aware you’re going to deride my theory as an example of rampant left wing twaddle, while you scoff at my soft-headed liberal idiocy. I’ll leave you to it. Enjoy. I wish you longevity and health so you can observe the ongoing cultural changes with all of your senses unimpeded.
I don’t want to only have the sandwich! Let’s talk about the sandwich and the burrito. If you tried to use burrito in a classroom example I’d make the same argument about it bring appropriate. Lot’s of people from all over the word have come to the US and as a result we’re more diverse. This means we’ve now got both sandwiches and burritos. I don’t want to ban using either of them as examples.
If you had the population of White-ville, USA as 100% white and half of them had never heard of a burrito before I would say the same thing to them: Get your heads out of your asses and figure out what a burrito is tomorrow. Hell, do it today. It’s not lunchtime yet.
Anything that is basically mainstream in US culture should be fair game for a classroom example. This includes traditionally American things like a PB&J or an imported one like a burrito.
The overall point stands: Trying to tiptoe around basic cultural references like a PB&J or a burrito is pointless and silly.
Well, hey, fuckhead, thanks for telling me my fears. I can now go cower in the corner from all these furriners invading my land of the free, home of the brave. How about what I actually said? Christ (or other mystical saviour, leader or sentient or nonsentient , fictional or nonfictional inspiring or non inspriing rabbi, priest, imam, or [insert relevant spirtitual or non spiritiual leader title here]) on a fucking all world culturally relevant acceptable for all cracker (or relevant to your culture) grain based crisp (or non crisp) baked (or non baked) good.
You put all those fucking hamsters to work and didn’t learn a fucking word about what I said. You wear a fucking ignorance helmet proudly 24 by 7 by 365 (366 in leap years). Any information you either don’t know or understand bounces off your fucking head like a bullet off Superman’s chest. Your hair cut is in the style of Lloyd Christmas due to having to work around the ignorance helmet. You are the fucking Teflon of ignorance.
I hope so. But you still haven’t addressed the actual concern represented by Gutierrez.
Can we pause here and recognize that this is also what Ms. Gutierrez is quoted as saying? But because you have the luxury of selecting your own language to use and your words aren’t filtered through a reporter’s lens, then edited down to fit a required word count, you’ve fleshed it out a little better, but here’s what Gutierrez says:
So right off the bat, your argument, Debaser, is the same as Ms. Gutierrez’!
So let’s continue.
Right, yes, exactly. If by “figure out” you mean “pay attention to the information provided.” And if your job is to get information and understanding of a subject across to a group, half of whom may not have experienced a burrito yet (because they may have spent the first few years of their young lives in a country without Taco Bells and El Chicos), can you just throw the burrito reference into the lesson without further explication and move on, assuming the burrito experience is universal? Ms. Gutierrez doesn’t think that’s best practice, and she’s directed her teachers to take explicit care that they don’t make such assumptions.
Again, I’m not seeing anything in the article, and I don’t know of any popular educational theory that pushes anything different than fair use of cultural references. Including traditional American references.
Tiptoeing around references isn’t really silly, if you see them as stumbling blocks. Ever been in a group of people who share a professional discipline or unusual interest you’re not familiar with? Did their use of jargon and unfamiliar terms detract from your ability to follow the discussion? Same thing happens if a teacher is casually using unfamiliar references without explication; makes it hard to follow the lesson.
So tiptoes at least imply you’re not ignoring those stumbling blocks. But tiptoes aren’t required in any case, she’s requiring her teachers just to practice open-eyed navigation.
So, what was it you said that both properly reflected and dispassionately dealt with the real world concerns offered by Ms. Gutierrez? That’s the subject I’ve tried to discuss with you.
Your last post to me was talking about some weird stuff some fictional person might have said, if they were saying what you want to argue about.
By the way to anyone who cares that’s responding to me: I do think dumb, counterproductive and recreationally sensitive ‘political correctness’ does exist, and that there have been a couple of examples cited in this thread. My argument has been that the “PB&J” thing is not such an example.
I’ve made a side argument in moderate support of the OP, in that I think the charge of ‘pc’ is used, probably at least as often as not, to defend bigotry. Usually institutional bigotry, but sometimes explicit racism, sexism or other expressions of bigotry.
This is where you lose me. “Knowing what a PB&J is” in no way is equivalent to “professional discipline or unusual interest”.
If I show up at a convention of surgeons I won’t be able to follow many conversations since I don’t have an MD and the lingo will be lost on me. I should expect that, and that’s OK. If a surgeon at that conference suggested not using any acronyms to accommodate me that would be misguided.
Similarly, if any kid shows up to class and doesn’t know what a PB&J is they should expect to be confused. They should feel a certain pressure to Americanize. Bending over backwards to accommodate them goes beyond celebrating diversity and into the absurd. The PB&J is one example, there are many others. We don’t need voting forms in 40 languages. If you don’t speak English you shouldn’t be voting. If you are so out of touch with American culture you don’t know what a PB&J is you should expect to miss lots of references in the classroom and elsewhere until you learn the culture.
This isn’t a bad thing. The faster people can assimilate into the culture here the better of they will be. The better off we all will be, in fact.
If you promise to take the helmet off, hie thee over to Fantastic Sam’s, get a proper 'do and listen, actually listen, I’ll give it one more go.
It’s not about fear. It’s not about the loss of some mythical American culture. It’s not about them damn furriners invading ‘murica and takin’ away my Rebel Flag. It’s about pragmatism. It comes down to simple pure old fashioned (not in the take my country back from the illegals old fashioned but the collquial old fashioned) pragmatism.
The teacher wants the chidlren to write down a list of instructions. This lesson,AIUI and what i am thinking the lesson is about, is to show how people can misunderstand and go awry things not clearly understood (wildly apropos). So the thing (MacGuffin as mentioned a couple times before) has to be fairly simply but with several steps that may or may not be missed. SO what that “thing” is is fairly unimportant, but generally ubiquitous for the setting. This happens to be PB&J in this example.
For a class of kids with peanut allergies, I would agree, that is probably not appropriate. In pretty much any other country in the world, due to the lack of ubiquity(that even a word?) of peanut butter throughout the rest of the world, it would probably be inappropriate. In Vietnam, it might be a banh mi. In Mexico, it might be a torta. In Greece, it might be the gyro. In France, it might be a croque-monsieur. BUT the class is in the United States. While there might be a couple of Vietnamese kids and a couple of Mexican kids and maybe a French kid. The fact of the matter is, pregmatically, it is less likely that a Mexican kid living in the US is going to be MORE familiar with a banh mi than a PB&J. The French kid will more likely be familiar with the PB&J than a torta.
This is not due to the mighty cock of US culture that must stand turgid and proud at all times like Big Jim Slade. It’s simply a pragmatic look at the collection of children and their collective surroundings. Yes a Mexican kid will potentially know more about the torta. The Vietnamese kid, the banh mi. But that’s irrelevant. These children are all in the US and to some extent have been MOST liekly to be expoised to the American thing than something other than their culture and the culture they are lving within. But even that’s getting too deep in the weeds about the overall intention of the lesson. Just pick the thing that the vast majority of kids will know to at least SOME extent and not spend a shit ton of time trying to figure out what item we can pick that will be the least offensive to all cultures. Simply pragmatism.
So then, extrapolate this out to all the teachers and all the lessons and all the subjects, it’s absolutely silly ridiculous and out of control to spend that many cycles on a smallish detail for a lesson that is totalyl about somethign else. Children arent graded on the quality of their sandwiches or their cultural knowledge of sandwiches. It’s write down the instructions and see how your instructions can be misinterpreted.
Which makes it pretty easy to deal with, yes? Would there be any reason to require a student to describe a simple process without first making sure they’ve had a chance to hear about, observe or perform that process? Takes just a minute to clear it up, but the problem has been that the universality of such typical American experiences can no longer be assumed in that student body. So again, the instruction isn’t to avoid those references, it’s to make sure each student can do something with the reference. Spend the 30 seconds to explain the simple reference or to find an analog that IS universal between those particular classmates and move on with the lesson.
Sure. What if those surgeons are taking a seminar on operation and general maintenance of a high tech diagnostic device and the technical instructor uses electronic and mechanical terms they’re unfamiliar with and blithely moves on? Are they getting their money’s worth out of that training? After all, they took the damned class because they need to know about the machine; now they’re spending time trying to translate what amounts to a different language. The class needs to be tailored to the students’ base level of understanding, or it won’t be useful.
Aha! <engineering joke>I think I see your problem right here, guy.</ej>
This has nothing at all to do with “celebrating diversity”. If you’re seeing it that way, you’re not following it. Gutierrez is not speakingliberal pinko peace and love theory here; she’s speaking hard-nosed educational pragmatism. It’s not her job to put pressure to Americanize on her students. It’s her job to deliver an education so that they’re ABLE to Americanize. And so that the 100% born-in-the-country American students can succeed also. And so that they all test well, because her school’s standing is based on those test scores, which don’t differentiate between ‘motivated to Americanize’, ‘already American’ or “que?”.
Another agreement. Which is why figuring out how best to get them to where they can read, write, express themselves and otherwise operate in this country is a necessary part of the job of educators. If that includes being aware of the limitations and special requirements imposed by the perspectives diverse elementary school students bring into the classroom, why object to that instead of just recognizing it?
Well, scout’s honor on the listening part, but the helmet blocks out those spy waves from the IRS black helicopters, so no deal on that.
Well, if I’m following you right, you’re saying the same thing Debaser said and, I believe and assert, the same thing Ms. Gutierrez is saying. (Debaser said it just a tetch more succinctly. You and I both may need to work on that.)
In other words: “Spend the 30 seconds to explain the simple reference or to find an analog that IS universal between those particular classmates and move on with the lesson.” Yes?
This is where I need some help from you. What is your concern with the assumption-checking being asked of the teachers? What “cycles” are you talking about that are too many? -This is a serious question, and I in no way intend to demean your concern here. You seem to be envisioning some excessive iterations involved in this and I’m trying to understand where you and I differ in our respective visions.
In my understanding of the direction to be culturally sensitive (in an “awareness” sort way, not a mind-everybody’s-feelings sort of way), there is absolutely no concern at all about sharing cultural knowledge (unless that’s the particular class being given). The concern is to speak to the students in terms and using references that are understandable to all of them, and don’t assume your favored terms and references are ubiquitous just because they used to be.
I don’t think you’d get any argument from Ms. Gutierrez or her teachers (and definitely not from me) that the point is to deliver the lesson on communication and to develop those skills in the students. The example to be used is completely unimportant except in a single aspect: it must be usable to each student who is asked to use it. In that sense, the PB&J isn’t really a MacGuffin as it’s used in fiction: it’s more like a vehicle for the lesson. You wouldn’t give each student a canoe and tell them to paddle to the other side of a pond without making sure all of the canoes float.