Challenging Racist Statements
The local free weekly comments on an Oakland alternative high school .
The School of Social Justice and Community Development in East Oakland is a different kind of public high school. The campus opened a couple of years ago after the Oakland school board gave it the go-ahead to become one of the district’s experimental, small alternative schools. On its Web site, the school lists its “general operating norms” for those on campus, one of which is to “Challenge racist, sexist, homophobic … and imperialist statements.” Wilson Riles Jr., known best for challenging the imperialist statements of Jerry Brown, briefly served as its principal.When it comes to challenging racist statements, though, administrators might want to start at home. Consider the “criteria for collective work,” which the school has posted online. This appears to be a set of principles meant to weed out volunteers, tutors, educators, and visitors who don’t like the school’s radical philosophy. Under the “What We Are Looking For” heading, for example, it includes entries such as “Conscious advocates of the struggle against class exploitation and oppression.”
But among the entries in the “What We Are Not Looking For” section is this: “Culture Vultures, white and privileged people seeking cultural or spiritual affirmation through the appropriation of the cultures and identities of oppressed peoples.”
As a card-carrying Caucasian, Bottom Feeder was a little offended, even saddened that he couldn’t visit the school and have a student threaten to pop a cap in his white ass (more on that in a minute). What if the above criterion were turned on its head to read, “What We Are Not Looking For: Sanctimonious minorities who want to use taxpayer dollars to run a Maoist re-education camp disguised as a high school”? Then what? Yeah, that’s right. People of color might be offended.
=v= While I deplore the racism in the school's criteria, I find myself more upset about the free local weekly's continuing journey from insightful commentary to mere smarm.
Rule #1 of parody is to understand what you're making fun of. "Maoist re-education camp?" Is the author unaware that the local Maoists tend to be persons of pallor who say things such as, "Yo! We gots Mao's Little Red Book in da house!" (yep, the very cultural vulturism mentioned in the school's criteria)?
Time was, the East Bay Express featured writers who comprehended nuances amongst the wacky politics and policies that abound in the East Bay. They understood the non-right-wing issue with "liberals" and treated them intelligently, whereas this writer seems to think this is a new, exotic, and — hyuk! hyuk! — ironic development.
The old EBE didn't shy away from poking fun at the foibles of the earnest. Columnist Alice Kahn wrote hilariously wry and sarcastic stuff about Berkeley, something one can only truly achieve by (Rule #1) understanding what one is writing about.
The EBE's decline can be traced back to its acquisition by New Times, Inc.; though as it has retained many of its excellent writers, its decline hasn't been as precipitous as that of the SF Weekly, across the Bay, after its acquisition by New Times. Uninformed brattiness is pretty much the New Times house style. Various editors have spun their publications' missions as being "less political," yet they don't seem to mind applying this house style where insight and intellect are far more appropriate. Such as, for example, on matters of race relations.
Posted by Jym on January 27 2004 09:02