I came across this blog post today:
http://profbw.wordpress.com/2008/06/23/academic-freedom-uhhh-is-that-like-group-think/
Essentially it seems that a high school teacher is being dismissed by a Watts, CA high school for assigning her students to read the scene from The Autobiography of Malcolm X where Shorty helps Malcolm conk his hair, a scene that came up in our discussion of the book last week.
Seems to me it’s one of the more benign scenes in the book and an appropriate one, I think, for a classroom of mostly African American and Latino children who are confronted daily with media images that do not necessarily affirm confidence in their own appearance.
Selfishly, I am in big trouble if public high schools are going to start forbidding such content in English and history classrooms, as the web site I edit is designed to be used by high school and college students studying African American, Latino and American Indian history and culture and has plenty of information about Malcolm X and other activists. If that content isn’t going to be allowed in the classroom, I guess I better think about updating my resume!
Some of you expressed interest in knowing more about my day job and I’ve included links to my projects below. The first is the home page of The American Mosaic, a subscription-based site that houses hundreds of books and thousands of primary documents on multiculutral topics, and the second is a blog focusing on Latino issues:
You can’t see much of the Mosaic without a subscription, but the blog is free and on the Mosaic you can read my essay on Slave Narratives (as Betsy informed us, early slave narratives played a large role in abolition and in the writing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin).
–Lisa
