“Since January 2021, 44 states have introduced bills or taken other steps that would restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism, according to an Education Week analysis. Eighteen states have imposed these bans and restrictions either through legislation or other avenues.”
“In 2021, the state’s Republican-led legislature passed House Bill 1775 which bans diversity training and limits discussions around race and sex in schools. Among other concepts it bans teaching that “any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex,” according to […]
“Ginsburg said that the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a non-profit, reports that more professors on the left and right have been “fired in the last few years than in the entire McCarthy period,” often in response to student demands: “This professor took this position, we can’t have this person here.” The complaints typically […]
“Amid national debates about what schools are teaching, we asked public K-12 teachers, teens and the American public how they see topics related to race, sexual orientation and gender identity playing out in the classroom.”
“But the complaint also pinpoints what Pennridge schools teach — and what they prevent students from learning — as a violation of civil rights. The curriculum changes, removal of DEI resources, and other steps to restrict student education on discrimination and its history “created an environment where race- and sex-based harassment can flourish,” the filing […]
“Diverse teams, when assessed by senior leaders, outperform their more homogenous peers only in the presence of psychological safety. More diversity is not always better — from a performance standpoint, diversity without inclusion can actually make things worse.”
“The responses varied notably by race and ethnicity. Among Black adults, 52 percent said the legal victory for Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was “mostly a good thing,” while 48 percent found it mostly bad. In comparison, 72 percent of white respondents, 68 percent of Hispanics and 63 percent […]
“I talked about having a firm but nonconfrontational phrase ready, something like “Dude, that’s messed up.” I talked about how to identify which classmates had the social clout to influence their peers and how to approach those people. I talked about when to get an adult involved and how to choose the right one. But […]
“A Navajo scholar offers insight and resources for educators”
“Together and separately, we’ve taught tens of thousands of individuals from all walks of life to have more meaningful and effective conversations across their differences. We focus our efforts on coaching people in positions of power because they have the greatest opportunity to transform the dynamics of these interactions — to foster empathy instead of […]
“Whether you’re reuniting with colleagues from our summer event in New Orleans or joining us for the first time, this workshop is designed to enrich your approach to incorporating African Diaspora topics into your AP Seminar classrooms. Part social gathering, part professional learning, the workshop will be an opportunity to share and reflect on highlights […]
“As an academic with expertise in the history of science, I am struck by just how much overlap there is between social justice parenting’s fixation on phenotypes and that found in 19th- and early-20th-century race science, lending credence to John McWhorter’s observation that antiracism might be better understood as a kind of “neoracism” that peddles […]
“My limited reading experience had given me the impression that stories about people of color had to be about being a person of color. I still wasn’t well-read, and in the work I knew by writers of color, questions of identity were central. This was true not just of Lahiri’s stories, but also of the […]
“Given the high rates of disengagement and burnout, especially for those in historically marginalized groups, companies need a new approach. The author argues for fostering four freedoms at work: the freedom to be, the freedom to become, the freedom to fade, and the freedom to fail.”
“I have been writing about economic diversity for almost two decades, since I discovered in 2004 how affluent the student body had become even at some public colleges, like the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia. And I have noticed a pattern. Although every university leader I interview claims to care about the […]
“The Bear revolves around a group of people building that much-maligned but essential entity — an institution. They believe in its purpose, and they give themselves to its practices. To watch this poetry of creation in an era dominated by the chaos of critique felt like a spiritual experience. Critique can be productive, or it […]
“Education has long been hailed as the path to upward mobility in America… But the income gains are far less than would be expected in a race-neutral labor market, a team of academic and nonprofit researchers found. A key reason, they conclude, is the persistence of occupational segregation.”
“When people from different backgrounds agree on a common set of metrics and buy into the same market, it allows them to see that everyone is connected and that their trust in the market is reciprocated and reinforced by others.”
“Female philosophers, often overlooked from the philosophical canon, are getting long-overdue recognition in a special radio series from “Philosophy Talk,” the nationally syndicated radio program hosted by Stanford scholars.”
“Gerwig loves Barbie, but she knows Barbie has made people feel bad, as if they don’t measure up. And so she has made this 113-minute love letter to Barbie that is also an earnest attempt to make amends. This is the most subversive thing about the movie, this extratextual notion that Barbie might have things […]
“Overall, the scholars found that when the intervention was administered in a supportive environment, first-year full-time completion rates for students in groups that had been persisting at lower rates rose by two percentage points, an impressive impact for an online exercise that took less than 30 minutes to complete (the average time students spent on […]
“I don’t need to turn every discussion into a debate. I can choose to understand rather than to win. Better, I can redefine ‘winning’ to mean ‘understanding.’”
“Joseph Conrad is remembered as a Polish writer who he went on to become one of the great masters of the English language. But the author of Heart of Darkness was actually born in a small village near Kyiv, and Ukraine was his home throughout his early years.”
“It’s possible to believe that sexism remains a major impediment to women’s flourishing and also believe that for many boys and men life is much harder than it should be. . . Even if you’re not inclined to care much about men’s welfare, their growing anomie and resentment is everyone’s problem, fueling right-wing populist movements […]
“As schools ponder what to call their work (DEI, JEDI, DEIJB, etc.), I urge you to avoid the illusion of inclusion and commit to the core issues before adding more letters.”
“How can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obligates people to realize some possibilities while forbidding others.”
“Not all students feel they can bring their whole selves into the classroom. Even the most well-meaning teachers can unwittingly do more harm than good. Many bicultural and bilingual children report experiencing a sense of loss when they acquire their second language (Casesa, 2013) and it’s not by coincidence that their educational setting plays a […]
“We can never achieve what we want simply by pointing out what we don’t. This is why I’m cautious about the term anti-racist. We should be mindful and avoid defining the world we want by articulating what we don’t want. The absence of violence doesn’t constitute peace, nor does the absence of illness constitute health. Peace […]
“We’re in an incredible moment and we can do things that have lasting change that goes five, 10, 30 years down the line. There is a moral case for diversity and inclusion. And there’s a business case: long-term value is tied to diversity and diversity is tied to innovation. But the last two years have told […]
“But then the very concept of “cultural appropriation” is misbegotten. As I’ve previously argued, it wrongly casts cultural practices as something like corporate intellectual property, an issue of ownership. Where there’s a real cause for offense, it usually involves not a property crime but something else: disrespect for other peoples.”
“The new admissions system will still count test scores and grades, but the school system will be divided into eight zones based on the socioeconomic conditions of neighborhoods. An equal number of high scoring applicants will be accepted from each zone. A similar system is used in Chicago to fill seats in its elite academic […]
“In reality, the bills many Republicans have proposed do not directly address critical race theory. Instead, many ban the teaching of concepts that educators say they don’t teach anyway. A bill signed into law by Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt bans lessons that include the concept that one race or sex is inherently superior to another […]
“There are (at least) two elements to wokeness. One focuses on concrete benefits for the disadvantaged — reparations, more diverse hiring, more equitable housing and economic policies. The other instigates savage word wars among the highly advantaged. If we can have more of the former and less of the latter, we’ll all be better off.”
“According to an analysis in the journal of the American Psychological Association, managers surveyed by the Society for Human Resource Management reported that age diversity positively contributed to organizational performance.”
“Prominent intellectuals have banded together against what they regard as contamination by the out-of-control woke leftism of American campuses and its attendant cancel culture. Pitted against them is a younger, more diverse guard that considers these theories as tools to understanding the willful blind spots of an increasingly diverse nation that still recoils at the […]
“Valdary is unusual because she shares many critiques of the multibillion-dollar “DEI industrial complex,” as sardonic observers call it, even as she argues that her framework avoids the flaws of her competitors’… Having interviewed her by phone and email, and having delved into her course material and the thinking behind it, I can confirm that […]
“The Battle of the Alamo exists as more than a historical event. It’s also a tool people use to justify the United States going to war, and has been for a long time. The Alamo is a story Texas has told to sort the good guys, who were the Anglo Texians, from the bad guys, […]
““There were Black Roman warriors, Black medieval knights, Black classical musicians, Black cowboys, Black fighter pilots. Where are they? I worry about you humans…”
“What does a culturally competent educator do differently? Cultural competency is a progressive state of professionalism in which one: becomes cognizant of how racial bias and inequity have been embedded in our culture and how our cultural values and beliefs influence professional practices, adapts professional practices to create more equitable student outcomes, dismantles inequitable policies […]
“There are also many feminists and criminal justice advocates on the left who believe that the anger that feeds cancel culture is often justified, but should be redirected toward a politics of restoration rather than retribution. “Changing culture meaningfully means approaching folks from the standpoint of ‘these harmful ideas you are perpetuating need to go,’” Kimberly […]
“WNRS is a purpose driven card game all about creating meaningful connections. 3 levels of questions and wildcards that all you to deepen your existing relationships, and create new ones.”
“We need to stop worrying exclusively about leadership and prepare them for ethical and active citizenship. It is only when we can talk to our students about the need to take less so that others can have their fair share that we will be able to honestly talk about race.”
“All these new research findings don’t undermine the ethical or ideological case for trigger warnings, but they do cast serious doubt on the psychological arguments mustered by trigger-warning advocates.”
“New Zealand is hoping that by 2040, one million Kiwis will be able to speak basic te reo Māori, the Maori language. This ambitious goal is part of an official language strategy that sees the revival of New Zealand’s Indigenous language as a key part in national identity and reconciliation.”
“When young people arrive at college they are encouraged to keep this focus on themselves by student groups, faculty members and also administrators whose full-time job is to deal with — and heighten the significance of — “diversity issues.” Fox News and other conservative media outlets make great sport of mocking the “campus craziness” that […]
“These voters — 526 total, representative of Americans who are registered to vote — were invited to spend a weekend in a resort outside Dallas to prove that there might be a better way to disagree… NORC surveyed the group before the conference, and again on the same questions at the end; the results were […]
“Guidelines and policies are not simply rules concerning what may be written; they constitute a culture by stipulating appropriate social conduct, such as how editors treat one another in talk-page debates.”
“What may have originated in a search for understanding and tolerance devolves into a relentless categorization of human experience.”
“Diversity is necessary in the workplace to generate creativity and innovation. It’s also necessary to get the job done. Teams with members from different backgrounds can attack problems from all angles and identify more possible solutions than teams whose members think alike.”
“The advantages of such switchovers are many. Repeat visitors will have fresh art experiences. New histories will get told. Old canons will start to erode. At the same time, though, MoMA’s organizational mettle will be under stress. Big museums are kludgy, slow-moving machines. I suspect the new schedule will keep MoMA staff up late working […]
“Race is difficult to count because, unlike income or employment, it is a social category that shifts with changes in culture, immigration, and ideas about genetics. So who counts as white has changed over time. In the 1910s and 1920s, the last time immigrants were such a large share of the American population, there were […]
“Although we’ve witnessed hate-fueled moments many times before, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about them when they occur. If we don’t, it means we’ve normalized them… Although such moments can feel confusing and out of control, there is a time-tested model we can rely on to help contextualize these events.”
“If I as a teacher, an individual with more power than any student, have not been challenging myself to be intellectually and spiritually free in my practice, how much freedom can my students possibly experience?”
Institutional practices and policies that target prejudice serve as an important representational cue—an explicit signal that the presence of all racial/ethnic groups are welcomed on campuses… Pride practices serve as a complementary yet distinct cue from prejudice practices. Pride policies and practices, for example, can include offering courses, extracurricular activities, and even physical spaces (e.g., […]
WarnerMedia said it would issue an annual public report on its progress, which it said would also take into account the L.G.B.T. community and those with disabilities.”
Instantly aware that his stab at Mel Brooks-style parody hadn’t landed, [the teacher] lowered his arm and tried to explain himself, telling his students that it used to be common to make fun of Nazis. Only recently, he said, had such jokes become taboo. He resumed the lesson, and the weird moment seemed to be […]
“I used to be ashamed about what it took for me to get to school every morning. Now I realize it was an education of its own.”
“The school has a faculty conscious of diversity and reflective about bias. But for all the good intentions, students of different races find themselves on different tracks, in different classes, with different outcomes… “America to Me” is full of moments like this, where you see how racial imbalances are perpetrated by people who don’t see […]
Telling people they’re racist, sexist and xenophobic is going to get you exactly nowhere. It’s such a threatening message. One of the things we know from social psychology is when people feel threatened, they can’t change, they can’t listen.”
“They all say generously that we ought to listen to the students, especially when the students seem to be looking out for each other, and we should not simply assume that they are opposed to freedom.”
[Michael Eric Dyson, Michelle Goldberg, Stephen Fry, Jordan Peterson] “Is political correctness an enemy of free speech, open debate and the free exchange of ideas? Or, by confronting head-on the dominant power relationships and social norms that exclude marginalised groups are we creating a more equitable and just society?”
“It’s ridiculous to criticize this as cultural appropriation… From the perspective of a Chinese person, if a foreign woman wears a qipao and thinks she looks pretty, then why shouldn’t she wear it?”
“Finishing rates varied significantly by gender. For men, the dropout rate was up almost 80 percent from 2017; for women, it was up only about 12 percent. Overall, 5 percent of men dropped out, versus just 3.8 percent of women. The trend was true at the elite level, too.”
“It’s important for all of us to address our biases. That’s why we’ll be making our education materials available to other companies, for use with their employees and leadership.”
“Over the past few months, amid mounting revelations of sexual harassment, The Chronicle Review asked presidents and adjuncts, scientists and humanists, senior scholars and junior professors to take on the theme of women and power in academe. Here are their responses.”
“John’s movies convey the anger and fear of isolation that adolescents feel, and seeing that others might feel the same way is a balm for the trauma that teen-agers experience. Whether that’s enough to make up for the impropriety of the films is hard to say.”
It’s a collection of insights from visionaries around the world aimed at anyone committed to empowering women. In a series of interviews, these women laid bare their struggles, revealed their secrets to success, and told us about their next big idea.”
There exists, somewhere within us, an image in which we are whole, in which we are home. Afrofuturism is, if nothing else, an attempt to imagine what that home would be. “Black Panther” cannot help being part of this.”
We found that 67% of the questions posed to male entrepreneurs were promotion-oriented, while 66% of those posed to female entrepreneurs were prevention-oriented.”
The study looked at students in ninth and 11th grade and estimated that nearly 3 percent are transgender or gender nonconforming.”
If “dem” is a strange book, it is strange in a familiar way. Part Roth, part Swift, part Twain, it is built of satire, farce, and hyperbole, all deployed in the name of moral seriousness.”
Despite forty years of exegesis and new thinking around postcolonial theory and empire studies, it’s as if the machinery of empire continues to cripple our thinking about ourselves as Americans. Every time I speak to Americans, unless they are comprised of people of color, I need to presume that they’ve heard none of this, that […]
In our effort to liberate, we have ended up imprisoning — imprisoning ourselves in the fractal infinity of our ever-subdividing identities, imprisoning each other in our exponentially multiplying varieties of otherness… Complement this particular direction of thought inspired by Walking on the Pastures of Wonder with James Baldwin and Margaret Mead’s spectacular conversation about identity […]
the millennial generation, now 44 percent minority, is the most diverse generation in American history. While its lasting legacy is yet to be determined, this generation is set to serve as a social, economic, and political bridge to chronologically successive (and increasingly) racially diverse generations. With an emphasis on its unique racial diversity, this report […]
As educators, it is our job to teach students how to think critically so that they can engage with larger social issues. That is not confined to just the social sciences, but has an impact on all academic disciplines and departments. Yet as Baldwin also said, society is not always that anxious to have a […]
The final clubs in particular are a product of another era, a time when Harvard’s student body was all male, culturally homogenous, and overwhelmingly white and affluent. Our student body today is significantly different. While we should respect tradition, it is incumbent on us to organize the institution for the benefit of our current students […]
The kitchen table is the most important tool they have to reshape their community. Preparing a home-cooked meal and inviting people over, both those we know and those we want to know, forces us to find common ground.”
Read the draft report of the Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging… Share seven recommendations in the first iteration of their report.”
In recent years, and most obviously since the rise of Black Lives Matter, private schools around the city have taken concerted care to recruit minority students, to introduce curriculums and conversation about racial understanding in lower grades, to seek diversity consultants and to promote inclusion around gender. At the same time, ostentatious displays of wealth […]
A whole scholastic vocabulary has been developed to express these notions: fluidity, hybridity, intersectionality, performativity, transgressivity, and more. Anyone familiar with medieval scholastic disputes over the mystery of the Holy Trinity — the original identity problem — will feel right at home.”
Many professors are spending the summer trying to figure out how to discuss the campus climate in class without raising the ire of this audience. In the last few months, at least a half-dozen professors have been threatened or fired for airing controversial positions on issues of color or, in the case of Dr. Goffman […]
In his 1993 book Kindly Inquisitors, the author Jonathan Rauch explains that freedom of speech is part of a system he calls “Liberal Science”—an intellectual system that arose with the Enlightenment and made the movement so successful. The rules of Liberal Science include: No argument is ever truly over, anyone can participate in the debate, […]
That’s why it’s reasonable, scientifically speaking, not to allow a provocateur and hatemonger like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at your school. He is part of something noxious, a campaign of abuse. There is nothing to be gained from debating him, for debate is not what he is offering. On the other hand, when the political […]
As the ethnic diversity of middle school increased, African-American, Latino, Asian, and white youth all reported feeling safer in school, less lonely, and less likely to be victimized.”
Think about all the people who have left New Orleans because of our exclusionary attitudes. Another friend asked me to consider these four monuments from the perspective of an African American mother or father trying to explain to their fifth grade daughter who Robert E. Lee is and why he stands atop of our beautiful […]
During high school, their first class every day is taught in a room on U.S.C.’s campus, so that college is demystified and becomes a fixed part of their vocabularies.”
Being triggered worked positively for me.”
But what if, all along, our well-meaning efforts at closing the achievement gap has been opening the door to racist ideas? What if different environments actually cause different kinds of achievement rather than different levels of achievement?”
If you seek the removal of freedoms from an opponent simply on the grounds that they have offended you, you have crossed the line to stand alongside tyrants who imprison, torture and kill on exactly the same justification.”
“When a school reaches a stable level of about 30 percent middle-class students, the lower-income students achieve at higher levels and the privileged students do no worse.”
“The issues raised by the Jordan Davis murder trial touch deeply on issues of race, law, social justice, and any and all of these issues could be a course of study… What follows is an attempt to organize what was a 15-hour brainstorming session into a few organizing concepts – 1) things to consider as […]
“Perhaps the best way to comprehend how King’s speech is understood today is to consider the radical transformation of attitudes toward the man who delivered it. Before his death, King was well on the way to being a pariah. In 1966, twice as many Americans had an unfavorable opinion of him as a favorable one… […]
“While I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew is a story about existential struggle in general, four of Dr. Seuss’s books have dealt with familiar and quite specific social issues: Illegitimate hierarchy, racism, ecology, and the arms race. In each, however, Dr. Seuss pushes beyond conventional liberal cliché to offer a more radical version […]