Category Archives: education

January 26, 2011, 8:26 pm

On The Idea That Merit Is Actually A System: An Intervention On Behalf Of Affirmative Action

These remarks were delivered on Saturday, January 22, at the Third Social Justice Leadership Conference, organized by students at Zenith University. I appeared on a panel about affirmative action policies and academic admissions with colleagues Alex DuPuy (sociology); J. Kehaulani Kauanui (American Studies and Anthropology); and Sonja Manjon, Vice President for Diversity and Strategic Partnerships. The panel began with remarks by Theodore M. Shaw, Columbia School of Law and formerly head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The conference followed a keynote by Geoffry Canada, of the Harlem Children’s Zone, given the previous evening.


On left, a self-identified “victim of a hate crime.” Credit.

The analysis that follows was shaped by what I observed in the fall of 2009 during a conflict provoked by some of our students over Zenith’s affirmative action policies; it was also shaped by…

January 17, 2011, 4:29 pm

Old Racism, New Clothes: Middle Class Child Abuse Is Not An Asian Thing

By Claire Potter

White women can be good mothers too, Amy!

It isn’t news that Yale Law prof Amy Chua has written a book about what she calls her “Tiger Mother” philosophy of parenting. Most of us would never have known about it if her publicist had not arranged to have an op-ed placed in the Wall Street Journal called “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.” It went viral, at least on academic Facebooks, almost immediately. Re-packaging the model minority thesis as a tough love philosophy, rather than the genetic predisposition to excellence that ignoramuses talked about for years, it raises a fascinating set of questions about the social construction of race as it intersects with ideologies of parenting. It has also, according to ABC News, caused Chua to receive death threats from readers who were outraged at parenting techniques that include yelling at her children, forcing them to practice the violin…

October 26, 2010, 3:13 pm

Hey, Is This Going To Be On The Test? Confederates In The Classroom

By Claire Potter

Cartoon by Walt Handelsman.

Let’s hear it for the Virginia Department of Education, which approved a textbook called Our Virginia: Past and Present for fourth graders in its public schools. It features the information that, according to this story in USA Today “thousands of black troops fought for the Confederacy….author Joy Masoff told The Washington Post that she found the passage on the Internet.” In case your brain is busy stereotyping Masoff as a renegade Daughter of the Confederacy, she is from Westchester, NY, and is the author of numerous children’s books.

Masoff’s Wikipedia entry has one account of the three Internet sources Masoff used that it claims link back to this document generated by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a group which works hard to separate the rebellion from the stink of involuntary human servitude. One way to do that is to imply massive black support …