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“I’m Going to Cancel the ‘Dear White People’ unit.”
Cowards!
Once upon a time, a white, hetero, cis, male Canadian was a Dean of a College. We were friends.
He was about to take over the directorship for the First-Year Seminar. That’s the course that the fresh-people take; for folks new to college. The class is about reading books and having a civilized and rational discussion of the information offered.
The course has several units, all different, meant to introduce students to a wide variety of topics common in university studies and contemporary life. Books might be about freedom of speech, or feminism, or the prison system, or poverty, or technology, or scientific progress, etc. You get the idea.
I’d put a new unit in the class during my shift as director—a team on the race. Maybe five years before George Floyd was killed, but Eric Garner’s case was all over the news.
I thought the class might watch the film Dear White People, and then we would discuss some relevant readings. I was going for Roxanne Gay’s Bad Feminist, probably something by Coates, and several other points of view.
I figured that the first-year students, many of whom could vote for the first time that year, might want to know about important issues the country faces as they graduate—knowing about basic…
