Despite evidence that punitive punishment is ineffective and damaging— at worst, pushing vulnerable children out of school into the carceral system and, at best, driving student resentment and a breakdown of the teacher-student relationship— we still enact them in the forms of detention, suspension, expulsion, and in extreme cases, practices that replicate our carceral system by introducing police, surveillance, fines and probation into schools. However, if you consider our current system of punitive discipline in schools as a continuation of European colonialism, we can begin to pick apart the origins and evolution of how our schools are increasingly operating as an extension of the penal system through hundreds of years of intentionally oppressive design.
Can Fonts Be Racist? (Yes, They Can)
Any text that is printed or digitally displayed has been deliberately chosen to look that way. Through repeated associations, racist messaging with a certain typeface in the past means that that typeface now carries that racist overtone even if the words bearing that typeface aren’t racist.
White Emptiness
This is a very, very vague idea as I’ve only started thinking about this topic and researching it this past week and I’m still having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around it but I might have to write a paper on it for a sociology class so I'm just going to post it... Continue Reading →
Scholar Denied: Kimberle Crenshaw and Intersectionality
While intersectionality has existed in the works of scholars and activists before her, Dr. Crenshaw was the person to coin the term in her book Demarginalising the Intersection of Race and Gender in 1989[1]. Dr. Crenshaw is a lawyer, civil rights advocate and law professor at the UCLA and Columbia Law School where she specialises... Continue Reading →
White History Month #1
There is a good number of Americans who believe that we are more racially integrated than ever before and that segregation is a problem of the past. This is simply not true. This is a mini-series or as I call them, ramblings. Since some people want a white history month so bad during Black History... Continue Reading →
[Repost] 13th: From Slave to Criminal With One Amendment
https://youtu.be/krfcq5pF8u8 Excerpts: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people...We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing... Continue Reading →
“I Don’t See Color”: Racism
Personally, few things are more infuriating when you can see that there is a problem and others can also see that there is a problem but the supervisor/teacher/parent/authority figure denies it or just claim not being aware of it. Sometimes, it's laziness. Sometimes, it's an "ignorance is bliss" defense but it is indefensible to those... Continue Reading →
February Quote of the Month
"This circle was a temple which had been devoured by ancient fires, profaned by the miasmal jungle, and whose god no longer received the homage of men." -"Circular Ruins" by Jorge Luis Borges
[Repost] Metaphysics and Homophobia
The most persistent forms of bigotry/intolerance are the ones who aren't as overt and comes in the form of microaggressions and exists when society excludes them from social and economic processes (think of Mr Norton from Invisible Man). It mentions in the video that some people, when confronted a subject of controversy like the existence of... Continue Reading →
4-Part Analysis of Invisible Man (Part 3)
[Synthesis with “Caged Bird” by Mary Angelou] I thought this poem was very representative of the IM’s internal dissonance in what he’s doing and in what he’s feeling. This something that we see throughout the book but in these hundred pages, we also see him assume another identity; one of a public speaker for the... Continue Reading →
July Study Piece Part 3: We Should Start Over
How we should have approached things “Don’t raise your voice, improve your argument.” – Desmond Tutu This is why we study history Timeline courtesy of Nemo. We may have went overboard the moral political indoctrination. Some would call it a “brutal education” in and of itself. The content was clouded by the method. There exist... Continue Reading →
Our Idiosyncratic Beliefs | July Study Piece Part 2: The “Orientals”
An Introduction With an insight on major themes of the detachment of public opinion through a psychological lens, we now take a look at the same motifs prevalent on the Eastern Front of World War II, specifically Japan. In the general time span of half a century, Japan has undergone a physical, spiritual, and cultural... Continue Reading →
Our Sunken Place |July Study Piece Part 1: The Psychology
“What good fortune for governments that people do not think.” - Adolf Hitler In humans, there has always been an intrinsic struggle between the self and others. We must be able to maintain a distinct self-identity while at the same time be able to fit as one of the innumerous cogs of society. Because... Continue Reading →
July 2018 Quote of the Month
“I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and Constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”
-Thomas Jefferson
February 2018 Quotes of the Month
“My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.”
-Desmond Tutu
"A dolphin gon shake his fin, regardless if he gets in Or out of water, most important thing for him is to swim And Flipper didn’t hold his nose, so why shall I hold my tongue?"
- Andre 3000, Sixteen