Tag: black history month

Do you know this man?

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I do a trivia question every week. It’s usually a history question of some sort, and the stakes are low; you can get the answer any way you want except for asking me (it’s literally impossible to cheat) and if you get it right you get a piece of candy on Friday. If you get it wrong nothing happens. Some kids do it every week, some when the mood strikes them or a friend offers them the answer, and some will pretend in late May that they never heard me mention it.

I usually theme the questions at least a little bit, and since it’s Black History Month I figured I’d highlight some figures from history and see how many the kids could identify. My building is pretty diverse, which I’m not using as a code word for “mostly Black,” I mean genuinely pretty well-mixed. That said, I’m not really expecting many of them, if any at all, to immediately recognize that fine gentleman up there; my theory was they’d either take a picture of the picture and ask some adults or do a reverse Google Image search, which I believe has been the process for the handful of correct answers I’ve received so far.

(Yes, I know “Who is this?” is not a trivia question in the classic sense of the term. Shut up. It’s my game and I can do it however I want. Next week will be Mae Jemison, I think.)

Anyway, the insistence from the first several kids that gave me answers that that was either MLK Jr. or fucking Steve Harvey has me questioning my sanity. And it wasn’t like it was white kids being clowns, either. At least one Black student asked me in apparent seriousness if it was King. I’m not supposed to give them help one way or another but I needed to shut that down immediately if I planned on surviving the week.

So. Without any research or double-checking, do you know who that is?

Halfway there

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

After getting sick three separate times in January, I swore that I was going to make it at least to our Presidents’ Day break without getting sick again. Assuming I’m able to get up and go to work tomorrow, I’m halfway there, and seeing as how we have a field trip for half the day I probably ought to go to work. 

(It’s not much of a field trip. We’re taking them to the high school for a tour.)

But either way I appear to have made it to work every day this week, and given how shit of a day Tuesday was, I’m going to call that an accomplishment. The kids in my LGBTQ club this afternoon were particularly fun. They’re so fucking weird; it makes them all kinds of fun to hang out with. 

Hey, did you know you can embed a .pdf in one of these? Because I just dragged this thing I’m using tomorrow onto the screen and it actually looks like it embedded pretty nicely. I mostly found these people through Wikipedia, so I don’t know much about them. Maybe I’ll tell the kids I’ll give them extra credit for picking somebody and writing a paragraph about them or something. Why not, right?

black-mathematiciansDownload

In which white people make terrible decisions

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, PoliticsLeave a comment

I seriously thought Ralph Northam’s stupid lying racist ass was the dumbest thing I was going to encounter this week, I really did. He issued what I thought was a pretty decent apology the night that the blackface/Klan picture broke, and I almost– almost– thought that maybe he shouldn’t have to immediately resign.

Well, fuck me for giving a racist a second’s benefit of the doubt, because the very next morning this asshole is not only trying to take back his admission that it was him in the picture, he “defends himself” by saying he wasn’t in blackface that time but there was this other time that he did it and man, isn’t shoe polish hard to get off your face?

So fuck that guy. He can go. Ain’t nobody gonna miss him.

(I won’t be entertaining a lot of debate on this point, for the record. We can lose everybody who ever wore blackface, period. I don’t give a fuck who you are or when you did it. I can’t believe that not only am I still having this fucking conversation, but it’s like the third time in a few weeks.)

And then I log onto Twitter for a moment during my lunch break and I get to play the Dead or an Asshole? game, since Liam Neeson is trending for some fucking reason. A wise man once said that the Internet plays a game where every day a new person is chosen as the Main Character of the Internet, and you win the game if that person is never you.  So, Liam lost the game today.

And Liam’s story kinda had me fucked up for a minute, you know? Because– and stay with me, here, because I’m phrasing this carefully– I very much do get the feeling that something terrible has happened to someone you care about, and you weren’t able to do anything about it. I very much do get the idea that in response to that trauma he went a little crazy for a little while. That’s not the problem.

No, the problem for Neeson is that he phrases this whole thing in terms of revenge, which … uh, randomly walking around with a club in your pocket and hoping that somebody black starts shit with you isn’t actually revenge, Liam. That’s racism. It’s not revenge when somebody does something to you or someone you care about and you beat the hell out of somebody who maybe sorta looks like the person who did it. That’s not what that word means. And from what I’ve read, he didn’t seem to recognize that distinction at all during his deeply weird interview for a movie that I already wasn’t going to see because I can’t tell if it’s a revenge fantasy or some sort of weird, fucked-up Fargo-level black comedy shit. Nothing about Cold Pursuit was worth this shit. Nothing.

I mean, ultimately I think Neeson’s gonna skate on this, because the story basically just boils down to I had some terrible racist thoughts for a while that didn’t lead to any actual actions, and that’s not enough to have a serious effect on his career unless it turns out he’s got some stories in his past where he did do some shady shit. I’ll call it 50-50 that that happens, we’ll see. But … dude? Why the hell did you decide to tell this story in the first place? This is shit for your shrink, not a goddamned junket interview!

We also watched the first half of the Netflix Fyre Festival documentary last night, a process so horrifying that my wife legitimately looked over at me and asked if I was okay a couple of times. It’s not even Tuesday, y’all, and I have had enough stories of stupid white people to last me until next Black History Month, thanks. We can be done now.