Author Topic: Academic decolonization  (Read 3459 times)

90sRetroFan

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Academic decolonization
« on: November 22, 2020, 12:38:22 am »
OLD CONTENT

We have a degree program!

home.dominican.edu/news/2019/07/social-justice/

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In response to a growing number of students interested in careers focused on social justice and civic engagement, Dominican University of California is adding a new degree program social justice this fall.

The Social Justice major will examine the links between well-being, social justice, and diverse worldviews and teach students to analyze social injustices and work toward positive social change. The major will integrate coursework, faculty expertise, and practical experience and exposure gained through engagement with community partners.

I would like to see some course content.

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Some good news:

www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-49435041

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Glasgow University has agreed to raise and spend £20m in reparations after discovering it benefited by millions of pounds from the slave trade.

It is believed to be the first institution in the UK to implement such a "programme of restorative justice".

The money will be raised and spent over the next 20 years on setting up and running the Glasgow-Caribbean Centre for Development Research.

It will be managed in partnership with the University of the West Indies.

The centre, to be co-located in Glasgow and the Caribbean, will sponsor research work and raise awareness of the history of slavery and its impact around the world.

Prof Sir Hilary Beckles, vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies, said the university's decision was a "bold, moral, historic step" in recognising the slavery aspect of its past.

The move comes almost a year after a study by the university looked at thousands of donations it received in the 18th and 19th Centuries.

It found many were from people whose wealth came from slavery.

University bosses said that although it never owned enslaved people or traded in the goods they produced, it was clear it had received significant financial support.

In total, the money it received is estimated as having a present day value of between £16.7m and £198m.Dr Mullen said the research was the first report of its type in British history and Glasgow was the first university to acknowledge financial income from slavery on such a scale.

Consider that if colonial-era slavery had never existed, none of these donations to universities would have been made, the rate of empirical knowledge expansion would have been slower due to less funding, and surely we would be living in a less complex world today. In reality, however, although slavery has since been abolished, we are still stuck with all that empirical knowledge which should never have been discovered. Even giving back the money now (while a nice gesture) won't erase the knowledge already discovered. Only the total death of Western civilization can perhaps achieve this.

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However, Glasgow's decision to begin a programme of reparations has not been universally welcomed.

Author and academic Joanna Williams said: "For me, the number one problem with this is that it suggests people who are alive today bear some historical responsibility for what their ancestors did in the past.

"[These were] truly barbaric and criminal acts, but to suggest that people alive today are responsible for the sins of their ancestors is a step too far."

She added: "It also suggests that other people who are alive today are victims of what happened to their ancestors. There comes a point we all need to move on from that and say that the past is the past."

Yes. That point will come when:

1) all descendants of colonialists have either voluntarily refrained or been prohibited from reproducing (currently not yet the case)

2) all identitarian concepts (e.g. "whiteness") from the colonial era have been discarded (currently not yet the case)

3) all symbols associated with colonialism (e.g. British Empire flag) have been discarded (currently not yet the case)

Until that occurs, the past evidently continues into the present, and to claim that "the past is the past" is intellectually dishonest.

No individual alive today bears responsibility for what their ancestors did in the past. On the other hand, every individual alive today has a duty to not transmit any further forward the bloodlines of those ancestors, and therein that very blood which caused those ancestors to behave as they historically did. To reproduce despite knowing your ancestors were colonialists is to increase the chances of colonialism happening again.

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yaledailynews.com/blog/2020/01/24/art-history-department-to-scrap-survey-course/

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Yale will stop teaching a storied introductory survey course in art history, citing the impossibility of adequately covering the entire field — and its varied cultural backgrounds — in one course.

Decades old and once taught by famous Yale professors like Vincent Scully, “Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present” was once touted to be one of Yale College’s quintessential classes. But this change is the latest response to student uneasiness over an idealized Western “canon” — a product of an overwhelmingly white, straight, European and male cadre of artists.

This spring, the final rendition of the course will seek to question the idea of Western art itself — a marked difference from the course’s focus at its inception. Art history department chair and the course’s instructor Tim Barringer told the News that he plans to demonstrate that a class about the history of art does not just mean Western art. Rather, when there are so many other regions, genres and traditions — all “equally deserving of study” — putting European art on a pedestal is “problematic,” he said.

Absolutely. An American university, in particular, should primarily focus on New World art history. And when secondarily covering Old World art history, it should certainly cover all of the Old World rather than ignore the parts which did not colonize the New World!

I do encourage studying Western art, but through non-Western eyes able to perceive its ugliness:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/western-civilization-is-ugly-48/

This is infinitely more helpful than studying art around the world through Western eyes (which will consider Western art superior).

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The decision to get rid of this survey art history course resembles the English Department’s move to “decolonize” its degree requirements in 2017. At the time, the department made a sequence titled “Major English Poets” optional for majors.

For years, the Directed Studies program — a six-credit sequence for first-year students focusing on philosophy, literature and political philosophy — has also fielded criticisms about its exclusive focus on the Western canon.

We have plenty of work awaiting.....

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It used to be commonplace during counterculture times to mock Ivy League Universities as being elitist havens for Westerners.....
We would even make fun of their antiquated renaissance era architecture, which they insisted on not changing due to "heritage"!
Yet look at what has happened now, Gentiles, most of whom are younger, fashionably proclaiming that monuments to Western icons explicitly be preserved due to precisely that reason: "heritage".

Oh how times have changed.

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Ignorance and Indoctrination of Westerners Kills Millions

Our Planet Earth is heading straight towards the most dangerous collision in its history. It is not a collision with some foreign body, with an asteroid or a comet, but with the most brutal and selfish chunk of its own inhabitants: with people who proudly call themselves “members of the Western civilization.”

Again and again it is clearly demonstrated that Western culture, which the paramount psychologist Carl Jung used to call “pathology”, couldn’t be trusted.

www.globalresearch.ca/ignorance-and-indoctrination-of-westerners-kills-millions/5489648

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rp

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Re: Academic decolonization
« Reply #1 on: November 23, 2020, 01:10:18 am »
Do you know who the author of this post was?:
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It used to be commonplace during counterculture times to mock Ivy League Universities as being elitist havens for Westerners.....
We would even make fun of their antiquated renaissance era architecture, which they insisted on not changing due to "heritage"!
Yet look at what has happened now, Gentiles, most of whom are younger, fashionably proclaiming that monuments to Western icons explicitly be preserved due to precisely that reason: "heritage".

Oh how times have changed.

90sRetroFan

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Re: Academic decolonization
« Reply #2 on: November 23, 2020, 02:16:52 am »
You!

90sRetroFan

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Re: Academic decolonization
« Reply #3 on: December 18, 2020, 10:58:11 pm »
https://www.rutgers.edu/news/rutgers-scholar-receives-prize-revolutionizing-how-we-look-aztec-society

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When Camilla Townsend set out to tell the story of the Aztecs, the Indigenous population of central Mexico whose government was wiped out following the arrival of Spanish explorers, she began a project that challenged previous beliefs about their lives.

For 500 years, understanding of the Aztec people was based on accounts written by their conquerors, or sometimes by Indigenous people answering leading questions put to them by Spanish historians. These accounts contained misinterpretations, now widely taught in schools as “facts,” including that the Aztecs were obsessed with death, and that they thought the Spanish conquistadors were gods.

But Townsend, a Distinguished Professor of History in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers-New Brunswick, realized that to gain an accurate understanding of native populations, research should focus on what the people said about themselves in their own language when they were in the privacy of their own homes, addressing themselves to their own descendants.
...
“Camilla Townsend revolutionizes how we should look at Aztec society before, during and after the arrival of Europeans in Central America,” said Peter Francopan, the prize’s 2020 jury chair. “After more than 500 years, we are finally able to see history through the eyes of the Indigenous people themselves rather than those of their conquerors. Not many books completely transform how we look at the past. This is one of those that does.”

This is what we need more of.

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“I found some surprises in what they wrote. For instance, there is absolutely no evidence that anyone thought Cortés, or any other Spaniard, was a god returning from the east. That story, as it turns out, comes initially from Spanish comments made later in the century,” she said.

I suspected as much.

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The Nahuatl sources portray Cortéz and the Spanish as powerful men who ****, burned and killed with impunity and whose metal weapons, gunpowder and smallpox overwhelmed Moctezuma’s efforts to fight them off or trade gold for peace, Townsend says.

In other words, Nahuatl sources portray Cortez & Co. as Westerners. Which is what they were. (Cortez was also Jewish. In fact he was Pizarro's cousin!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hern%C3%A1n_Cort%C3%A9s

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Through his mother, Hernán was second cousin once removed of Francisco Pizarro, who later conquered the Inca Empire of modern-day Peru, and not to be confused with another Francisco Pizarro, who joined Cortés to conquer the Aztecs.

Colonialism runs in their family! This is it is so important to exterminate colonialist bloodlines.

Back to the article:

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Townsend is currently studying the traditions of the Lenape, or Delaware, people who were indigenous to New Jersey but who in the 18th century were pushed out by European colonists and now live in Oklahoma.

Keep up the good work!

But although we have finally cleared up that the Aztecs did not think Cortez was a god, it unfortunately remains reality that too many of their present-day descendants think present-day "whites" are gods:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/issues/psychological-decolonization/

and want to reproduce with them:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/issues/reproductive-decolonization/

We are here to change this.
« Last Edit: December 18, 2020, 11:01:14 pm by 90sRetroFan »

90sRetroFan

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Re: Academic decolonization
« Reply #4 on: December 21, 2020, 10:45:49 pm »
https://nypost.com/2020/12/19/faculty-at-nycs-dalton-school-issues-8-page-anti-racism-manifesto/

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Abolishing high-level academic courses by 2023 if the performance of black students is not on par with non-blacks.

This is basically what I advocated for years ago, in opposition to the False Leftists (actually neocons) who wanted ways to 'improve' (according to Western standards) "black" student performance in Western subjects. As I said back then, the "black" student underperformance is not the problem; the problem is the Western standards and the Western subjects themselves. If anything, "black" underperformance in Western subjects is a healthy reaction. Contrast with Jewish overperformance:

http://aryanism.net/blog/other/racial-jewishness-archive-from-true-left-forum/

Imagine if the above policy had been implemented worldwide by 1823 instead of 2023. Almost all of the following could have been avoided:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/western-civilization-is-a-health-hazard/

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/western-civilization-sustainable-evil/

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/if-western-civilization-does-not-die-soon/

This is what academic decolonization truly means. Many of the academic subjects studied today were never meant to exist in the world and would never have existed if not for post-Renaissance Western civilization bringing them into existence. But with the above measure applied worldwide we could end their existence within one generational cycle and begin to heal the world.
« Last Edit: December 21, 2020, 10:47:50 pm by 90sRetroFan »

90sRetroFan

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90sRetroFan

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Re: Academic decolonization
« Reply #6 on: January 17, 2021, 12:50:49 am »
https://www.wnd.com/2021/01/state-school-standards-banish-lessons-world-war-ii-holocaust-civil-war/

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State school standards banish lessons about World War I, II, Holocaust, Civil War
...
The new standards call for students to describe "the tactics used by the United States government to claim indigenous and Mexican land, including but not limited to an analysis of the ideology of Manifest Destiny and its relationship to whiteness, Christianity, and capitalism; and analyze the strategies used by Native Americans and Mexicans to respond to U.S. settler colonialism."

Not a bad start at all. Which is not to say that WWII is not an important topic, but by removing it from the school syllabus (which has taught it with bias against Hitler) hopefully it will become easier for people to approach the topic later without prejudice. (Perhaps one day the reaction by students to the term "Holocaust" will simply be "What's that?")
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90sRetroFan

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Re: Academic decolonization
« Reply #7 on: January 29, 2021, 10:49:07 pm »
Our enemy Glenn Beck acknowledges the success of our Demographic Blueshift strategy:


90sRetroFan

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Re: Academic decolonization
« Reply #8 on: February 03, 2021, 11:04:46 pm »
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/magazine/classics-greece-rome-whiteness.html

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They have noted that in fifth-century-B.C. Athens, which has been celebrated as the birthplace of democracy, participation in politics was restricted to male citizens; thousands of enslaved people worked and died in silver mines south of the city, and custom dictated that upper-class women could not leave the house unless they were veiled and accompanied by a male relative. They have shown that the concept of Western civilization emerged as a euphemism for “white civilization” in the writing of men like Lothrop Stoddard, a Klansman and eugenicist. Some classicists have come around to the idea that their discipline forms part of the scaffold of white supremacy — a traumatic process one described to me as “reverse red-pilling” — but they are also starting to see an opportunity in their position. Because classics played a role in constructing whiteness, they believed, perhaps the field also had a role to play in its dismantling.
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Padilla’s vision of classics’ complicity in systemic injustice is uncompromising, even by the standards of some of his allies. He has condemned the field as “equal parts vampire and cannibal” — a dangerous force that has been used to murder, enslave and subjugate. “He’s on record as saying that he’s not sure the discipline deserves a future,” Denis Feeney, a Latinist at Princeton, told me. Padilla believes that classics is so entangled with white supremacy as to be inseparable from it. “Far from being extrinsic to the study of Greco-Roman antiquity,” he has written, “the production of whiteness turns on closer examination to reside in the very marrows of classics.”

When Padilla ended his talk, the audience was invited to ask questions. Williams, an independent scholar from California, was one of the first to speak. She rose from her seat in the front row and adjusted a standing microphone that had been placed in the center of the room. “I’ll probably offend all of you,” she began. Rather than kowtowing to criticism, Williams said, “maybe we should start defending our discipline.” She protested that it was imperative to stand up for the classics as the political, literary and philosophical foundation of European and American culture: “It’s Western civilization. It matters because it’s the West.” Hadn’t classics given us the concepts of liberty, equality and democracy?

At this point, if only Padilla had responded that America is not the West, he could have taken the discussion to the level we are already at and waiting for the rest of the world to catch up to. But of course he did not.

False Leftists have to confront their internal contradiction sooner or later. You cannot love democracy and hate Western civilization. Either you love both or you hate both. But until False Leftists make this choice, they will remain rhetorically impaired.

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Like their counterparts in the United States, slavers in the Dominican Republic sometimes bestowed classical names on their charges as a mark of their civilizing mission, so the legacy of slavery — and its entanglement with classics — remains legible in the names of many Dominicans today. “Why are there Dominicans named Temístocles?” Padilla used to wonder as a kid. “Why is Manny Ramirez’s middle name Aristides?” Trujillo’s own middle name was Leónidas, after the Spartan king who martyred himself with 300 of his soldiers at Thermopylae, and who has become an icon of the far right.

This should be considered embarassing.

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Now he watched as alt-right figures like Richard Spencer, who had fantasized about creating a “white ethno-state on the North American continent” that would be “a reconstitution of the Roman Empire,” rose to national prominence. In response to rising anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe and the United States, Mary Beard, perhaps the most famous classicist alive, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the Romans “would have been puzzled by our modern problems with migration and asylum,” because the empire was founded on the “principles of incorporation and of the free movement of people.”

Beard is actually correct (though I would add that the Roman Empire also ended democracy). But look at Padilla's idiotic response:

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Padilla found himself frustrated by the manner in which scholars were trying to combat Trumpian rhetoric. In November 2015, he wrote an essay for Eidolon, an online classics journal, clarifying that in Rome, as in the United States, paeans to multiculturalism coexisted with hatred of foreigners. Defending a client in court, Cicero argued that “denying foreigners access to our city is patently inhumane,” but ancient authors also recount the expulsions of whole “suspect” populations, including a roundup of Jews in 139 B.C., who were not considered “suitable enough to live alongside Romans.”

Jews were not considered suitable to live alongside Romans not because they were foreigners, but because they were Jews and therefore racists. As we keep on repeating, hostility towards Jews is anti-racism.

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Enlightenment thinkers created a hierarchy with Greece and Rome, coded as white, on top, and everything else below. “That exclusion was at the heart of classics as a project,” Paul Kosmin, a professor of ancient history at Harvard, told me. Among those Enlightenment thinkers were many of America’s founding fathers. Aristotle’s belief that some people were “slaves by nature” was welcomed with special zeal in the American South before the Civil War, which sought to defend slavery in the face of abolitionist critique. In “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Thomas Jefferson wrote that despite their condition in life, Rome’s enslaved showed themselves to be the “rarest artists” who “excelled too at science, insomuch as to be usually employed as tutors to their master’s children.” The fact that Africans had not done the same, he argued, proved that the problem was their race.

I am thankful they had not done the same, or else the world would be in an even worse situation by today.

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Jefferson, along with most wealthy young men of his time, studied classics at college, where students often spent half their time reading and translating Greek and Roman texts. “Next to Christianity,” writes Caroline Winterer, a historian at Stanford, “the central intellectual project in America before the late 19th century was classicism.”

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While the founding fathers chose to emulate the Roman republic, fearful of the tyranny of the majority, later generations of Americans drew inspiration from Athenian democracy, particularly after the franchise was extended to nearly all white men regardless of property ownership in the early decades of the 1800s.

And look where that led. The US should have transitioned from republic to dictatorship like Rome did.

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Joshua Katz, a prominent Princeton classicist, published an op-ed in the online magazine Quillette in which he referred to the Black Justice League, a student group, as a “terrorist organization”

Katz is a Jewish surname. Jews are racist. The US should have excluded Jews like Rome did.

Zea_mays

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Re: Psychological decolonization
« Reply #9 on: March 14, 2021, 05:47:56 pm »
Music Theory and White Supremacy


As explained in the later part of the video, the basis of the academic study of "music theory" consisting of the study of only post-Renaissance Western styles can most strongly be traced back to the Jewish music theorist Heinrich Schenker.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Schenker

90sRetroFan

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Re: Academic decolonization
« Reply #10 on: March 20, 2021, 10:25:47 pm »
https://www.yahoo.com/news/rights-dead-living-clash-scientists-145833951.html

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Rights of the dead and the living clash when scientists extract DNA from human remains
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Authorities in Chile have denounced the research. They believe a looter plundered the girl from her grave and illegally took her from the country. The Chilean Society of Biological Anthropology issued a damning statement. It asked, “Could you imagine the same study carried out using the corpse of someone’s miscarried baby in Europe or America?”

I cannot. But the reason it happens to everyone else is because it's OK to be a "white" archaeologist:

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Plundering skulls for science

We have seen a rush for human remains before. More than a century ago, anthropologists were eager to assemble collections of skeletons. They were building a science of humanity and needed samples of skulls and bones to determine evolutionary history and define the characteristics of human races.

Researchers emptied cemeteries and excavated ancient tombs. They took skulls from massacre sites. “It is most unpleasant work to steal bones from a grave,” the father of anthropology, Franz Boas, once grumbled, “but what is the use, someone has to do it.”

The case of Qisuk, an Inuit man, provides an especially egregious example. In 1897, the explorer Robert Peary brought Qisuk and five others to New York from Greenland, so anthropologists could more easily study their culture. Four of them, including Qisuk, soon died of tuberculosis.

Anthropologists and doctors conspired to fake Qisuk’s burial to trick his surviving 8-year-old son, then dissected the body and defleshed the bones. Qisuk’s skeleton was mounted and hung at the American Museum of Natural History. (It is still disputed today whether Qisuk was only stored at the museum or put on public display.)

By the end of the 20th century, U.S. museums held the remains of some 200,000 Native American skeletons.

These skeletons helped write the American continent’s history and foster an appreciation for Native cultures. Yet the insights gleaned from these gathered remains came at a steep price: Native Americans’ religious freedoms and human rights were systematically violated. Many Native Americans believe their ancestors’ spirits have been left to wander. Others insist that all ancestors should be afforded honor and their graves should be protected.

Today, a U.S. federal law provides for the return of stolen skeletons. Still, the legacy of these collections will haunt us for generations. Many Native Americans are profoundly distrustful of archaeologists. And even after nearly 30 years of active repatriation of human remains, there are still more than 100,000 skeletons in U.S. museums. By my estimation, it will take 238 years to return these remains at this rate – if they are ever even returned at all.

Seeking consent

For too long scientists failed to ask basic ethical questions: Who should control collections of human remains? What are the positive and negative consequences of studies based on skeletons? And how can scientists work to enhance, rather than undermine, the rights of the people they study?

One place to look for answers is the Belmont Report. Published in 1979, this was the scientific community’s response to the Tuskegee Study. Over the course of 40 years, the U.S. government denied medical treatment to more than 400 black men infected with syphilis, to watch the disease’s evolution. In the aftermath of the resulting scandal, the Belmont Report insisted that biomedical researchers must have respect for people, try to do good as well as avoid harm, and fairly distribute the burdens and benefits of research.

Although these guidelines were intended for living subjects, they provide a framework to consider research on the dead. After all, research on the dead ultimately affects the living. One way to ensure these protections is to seek informed consent from individuals, kin, communities or legal authorities before conducting studies.

Western academics think nothing of initiating any type or quantity of violence so long as they get research done out of it. (This is even more obvious when we look at their history of experimenting on non-humans.) It is this entire value system which must be toppled. No knowledge is worth any initiated violence. Anyone who thinks otherwise is already a Westerner.

90sRetroFan

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Re: Academic decolonization
« Reply #11 on: April 17, 2021, 12:30:47 am »
We need more of this:

https://www.city-journal.org/california-ethnic-studies-programs-merchants-of-revolution

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California public schools are embarking on a new experiment: education as social justice. Earlier this year, the state Department of Education approved an ethnic studies model curriculum, and individual school districts have begun to implement programs that advocate “decolonizing” the United States and “liberating” students from capitalism, patriarchy, and settler colonialism.
...
According to slides and contemporaneous notes from the session, the Santa Clara Office of Education began the presentation with a “land acknowledgement,” claiming that Santa Clara County and the public school system “occupy the unceded territory of the Muwekma Ohlone Nation, the sovereign nation and original people of the skies, land, and waters.” The premise of this ritual, which has become common in progressive organizations, is that the American government, founded by white settlers, is an illegitimate colonial power that should return the land to the Native American tribes.
...
Pacheco then argued that the United States is a political regime based on “settler colonialism,” which he describes as a “system of oppression” that “occupies and usurps land/labor/resources from one group of people for the benefit of another.” The settler colonialist regime, Pacheco continues, is “not just a vicious thing of the past, but [one that] exists as long as settlers are living on appropriated land.” The white colonialist regime of the United States is a “parasitic system” responsible for domestic violence, drug overdoses, and other social problems. In a related PowerPoint slide, Pacheco presented examples of this oppression, including “men exploiting women,” “white people exploiting people of color,” and “rich people exploiting poor people.”

What is the solution? Pacheco argues that teachers must “awaken [students] to the oppression” and lead them to “decodify” and eventually “destroy” the dominant political regime. The first step in this process is to help students “get into the mind of a white man” such as Christopher Columbus and analyze “what ideology led these white male settlers to be power and land hungry and justify stealing indigenous land through genocide.” Pacheco describes this process as transforming students into “activist intellectuals” who “decodify systems of oppression” into their component parts, including “white supremacy, patriarchy, classism, genocide, private property, and God.”

Teachers must be careful, though: Pacheco and the other panelists suggested that local educators hide this revolutionary pedagogy from administrators and families. “District guidelines and expectations are barriers,” said one panelist. “[We] have to be extra careful about what is being said, since we can’t just say something controversial now that we’re in people’s homes [because of remote learning].” In addition, teachers must acknowledge that they, too, can become oppressors in the classroom. “Inherently, [it is the] oppressor who sets the rules.” Teachers must “recognize [their] own privilege and [their] own bias” in order to align themselves with the oppressed and work toward dismantling systems of oppression.

90sRetroFan

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Re: Academic decolonization
« Reply #12 on: April 30, 2021, 10:40:06 pm »
How bad things are:

https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2021/04/16/teaching-issues-can-be-among-biggest-obstacles-retaining-bipoc-women-faculty

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BIPOC women are often assigned more new course preparations and more service courses with larger enrollments. This informal or invisible teaching overload means that the “same” teaching load is experienced quite differently.

Imagine the teaching load of one instructor assigned all new course preparations or introductory service courses with enrollments of 150 students each. Then compare that to the teaching load of a person assigned only previously taught courses or elective courses on their own research topics with enrollments of just 15 students of fewer. If both these individuals have the “same” 2-2 (or 5-5) teaching assignment, is that really the same load? Absolutely not.

How are BIPOC faculty women supposed to publish with heavy teaching loads? The truth is that they often cannot. This unfair diversion of their time and energy away from publishing contributes to lowered productivity -- compared to white male peers -- related to the grants and publications that are the institutional currency for tenure and promotion.

Student and Colleague Resistance

Students behaving aggressively in the classroom also play a role in derailing tenure. White students disproportionately challenge the authority of BIPOC women and are twice as likely to inappropriately question them when being taught about social justice issues (e.g., systemic racism). Eric Grollman notes that “There are scholars who’ve been attacked for what they teach in the classroom” and that these experiences are not “anecdotal” or “isolated” incidents. They are unfortunately common features for these women, as evidenced by the research on their raced and gendered classroom experiences. Unfortunately, as Saida Grundy elaborates in her article “A history of white violence tells us attacks on black academics are not ending (I know because it happened to me),” BIPOC women are alert to the fact they could be next to be attacked.

Colleagues can also behave aggressively toward and interfere with the tenure of BIPOC women when it comes to teaching. These women’s transformative teaching is often in conflict with their white male colleagues’ more traditional (e.g., lecture) approaches to pedagogy. When BIPOC faculty teach about inclusive topics like race, white colleagues can antagonistically label it as marginal and illegitimate knowledge. Many BIPOC women faculty have told me of white colleagues, chairs and deans who constantly and intensely pressure them to revert to lecture-only teaching that focuses on the white male “classics.”

In a public letter, Michelle Gibbs describes such unchecked hostilities as reasons she left her institution: “There are not enough white faculty and administrators willing to publicly teach white students how to hold themselves accountable for their racist behavior in the classroom. This unpaid emotional labor is often left to Black and Brown faculty who recognize it, feel it, and (all alone) are left to call it out. It is exhausting work and doesn’t win us any favors with colleagues and administrators.” She isn’t alone. Undue stress results in other BIPOC women exiting higher education institutions, too. And for those who stay, such discrimination wreaks havoc on their publication productivity.

Unsound Tenure and Promotion Practices

Student and colleague resistance to BIPOC women’s classroom authority, pedagogy and content is not without consequence. It can significantly impact tenure and promotion reviews through practices that are common but not methodologically sound. Let’s focus on two of those practices: the incorrect use of student evaluations and flawed teaching observation processes.

Colleges and universities often contribute to the demise of BIPOC faculty retention by using student evaluations in incredibly incorrect ways in reviews. For starters, many misuse the student evaluation data by using the mean score, focusing on outlier comments and comparing faculty to one another. Additionally, many improperly use the student evaluations as the primary or only measurement of teaching quality. Those practices don’t adhere to the general guidance about interpreting such data and evaluating teaching, and they result in inaccurate conclusions about teaching quality in reviews.

Arriving at unfounded conclusions about teaching quality is problematic for “normal” contexts. Yet it is even more problematic when reviewing the teaching of BIPOC women. Instead of presenting a sound view of teaching quality, these practices amplify the raced and gendered biases frequently found in student evaluations. And then colleagues, chairs and deans turn around and use these inaccurate and unsupported claims of poor teaching quality to deny the tenure and promotion of BIPOC women.

The flawed teaching observations of many colleges and universities also have a direct impact on tenure and promotion decisions. Does the following sound familiar? A faculty member is “informed” that “someone” will be observing their teaching, and it happens with no/minimal discussion about the nature or focus of the observation. None of these features aligns with appropriate teaching observation practices.

Here’s why it matters. A Black woman faculty member recounted to me the damage that was done to her tenure review because of a teaching observation. In her colleague’s written observation report, he accused her of teaching controversial content, going so far as to say that he (a white male) would feel unwelcome as a student in her classroom. What was she teaching? Her scholarly expertise on structural racism. Let’s be clear: the observer did not report witnessing actual student discomfort. In fact, the Black woman faculty member won a teaching award shortly afterward for which she was nominated and voted to win by the students. Instead, the colleague wrote negatively about her teaching in her tenure review because he equated his offense about the course content with an assessment of its quality. Over and over again I have heard eerily similar versions of this experience from other BIPOC faculty.

Meanwhile, it's OK to be a "white" teacher:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/jersey-teacher-curses-black-students-224500985.html

Quote
Dickinson High School teacher Howard Zlotkin targeted his Black students and used profanity as he complained about his ‘privilege’

A New Jersey teacher has been removed from the virtual classroom after going a profanity-laced rant against his students about race, Black Lives Matter and George Floyd.
...
“If you think I’m privileged then f— you, because my daughter thinks I’m privileged and I don’t speak to her,” he said on Zoom, which was recorded by a student.
...
Williams and her mother, Margie Nieves, said they contacted school officials but did not hear back from them until they contacted the news station.

“Who does that? Who would curse, I don’t even curse at my own daughter,” said Nieves.

The mother and daughter said they were shocked to see that Zlotkin had returned to class and yet again cursed at students. He also called out Williams who had refused to complete the essay he asked her and the other Black students to write.

“I don’t think you can make a case. You know what Timmia? You’re full of s–t too,” Zlotkin said during another recording of his remarks.
...
When contacted by NBC New York, Dickinson High School officials said that Zlotkin was temporarily removed from the classroom and school as they look into the incident, but did not indicate if there would be any further discipline.
« Last Edit: April 30, 2021, 10:46:03 pm by 90sRetroFan »

90sRetroFan

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Re: Academic decolonization
« Reply #13 on: May 02, 2021, 04:43:04 am »
I always hated Newton when I was in school:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/24/isaac-newton-latest-historical-figure-swept-decolonisation-drive/

Quote
Sir Isaac Newton has been labelled as a potential beneficiary of “colonial-era activity” in draft plans to “decolonise” the engineering curriculum at Sheffield University.
...
Newton, who lived until 1727, laid the foundations of modern science with his theory of gravity, in the seminal Principia, and theories on light, time, colour and calculus.
...
it is known that he held shares in the South Sea Company that traded in slaves.

Newton had another area of interest:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_on_the_Jewish_Temple

Quote
Notes on the Jewish Temple is a manuscript by Isaac Newton, written in Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, which holds notes on the Jewish Temple and its rituals.

Today the manuscript is found in the collections of the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem.
...
The book contains Hebrew and Aramaic phrases which were copied to Hebrew letters by Newton, such as the phrase: "ברוך שם כבוד מלכותו לעולם ועד" (English: Blessed be the name of His glorious kingdom for all eternity).
...
The manuscript contains references to a variety of sources, including the Old Testament, the Midrash (interpreting biblical stories) of the sophos Hillel and Shammai, the Talmud, the Zohar, and Targum Jonathan.

It is all linked. Western empirical science and Western colonialism (including slavery) are both at their roots products of fundamental gratitude to Yahweh for creating the material world in the first place. Newton embodies this attitude in a consistent way.

Imagine how much simpler the world would be if Newton had never existed! How much of this could have been avoided:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/western-civilization-is-a-health-hazard/

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/if-western-civilization-does-not-die-soon/

rp

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Re: Academic decolonization
« Reply #14 on: May 02, 2021, 10:41:28 am »
"I always hated Newton when I was in school:"
You and me both. Guess that makes two of us. I've always viewed him as some mentally sick bastard who purposefully wanted to overcomplicate and overthink things out of his "curiosity".

At least he didn't leave any offspring. But you could argue the amount of knowledge he discovered has been far more damaging to the rest of the world even though he did not reproduce.

Here is a false leftist meme ridiculing him for this:

First of all, dying without reproducing is noble. However, Newton does not fit into this category because he had already done so much damage while he was alive that it was inconsequential. Therefore, it is incorrect to state that this was some kind of "loss" for Newton.

On the other hand, those who actually die without reproducing because of their lack of interest in the material world are those who we should be praising.
« Last Edit: May 02, 2021, 11:39:52 am by rp »