How were your eyes opened to sexism?
As a tetrachromat, I can see shades of sexism you can't even imagine.
2: more or less by working with a therapist, who pointed out that I had internalized a huge number of women-are-annoying tropes.
Ten years ago, it was a thing for young college students to believe racism was over
Huh...I had assumed that the whole "post-racial America" meme had been invented by progressive web sites purely in order to make fun of it.
Sexism is racist.
Because slightly more than 50% of black people are female, so if you're bigoted against all black people then women will suffer more than men as a result.
6: oh huh, and the therapist thought that was a bad thing? And you didnt become annoying??
Y'all are just a bunch of Pauline Kaels. Acknowledgement of racism and sexism may be fashionable among pointy-headed liberals, but I promise you that denial is alive and well out there in Real America, including among college students.
11: Where do you think heebie lives? Who do you think she is teaching?
11 is right. But, I think it may be possible that sexism will become too stupid to not be laughed at.
13: Somehow it's the part where he doesn't know about menopause that gets me.
I think we should just be impressed he managed to write a letter.
I guess maybe he didn't. It says "Submitted by Virtual Newsroom."
That is, I have also internalized a lot of stuff, some of it from reading "Men are from Mars..." in Gender Studies 101 (we were meant to critique it). I just made a note of all the female-patterned behavior and resolved never to do any of it so as not to lose face/be weak.
Huh...I had assumed that the whole "post-racial America" meme had been invented by progressive web sites purely in order to make fun of it.
Of course people believe that. It's what you learn in school. We had all these Jim Crow laws that enforced white supremacy, then we got rid of them, now things are fine.
Just like everything else in school, the teachers are most comfortable saying that history is a progression from bad things to good things. Reconstruction is the worst part. I definitely learned "There was a lot of chaos after the Civil War, the federal government went way too far enforcing martial law in the southern states to force them to do what the state governments didn't want to do, but it got sorted out by wise compromises." I even came away with the impression that "scalawags" and "carpetbaggers" were objectively bad people. Then many decades later it turns out that there is a big problem in the South with racial injustice for some reason, and again things are solved in a satisfying way.
19: It's amazing how completely the Dunning School captured US history in public (and probably private as well) schools. The whole reconstruction went too far and carpetbaggers and scalawags oppressed the poor southerners thing was the official story in my 1980s Californian public school US history class.
I learned that the south was full of racist shitheads and the north quit too soon. Nuns.
20: And in liberal NYC in the 1980s, while we didn't get that, we did get 'it is hopelessly naive to think that slavery was the cause of the Civil War', and we sort of skipped Reconstruction and the aftermath. In retrospect, my guess is that the Dunning School was so much the norm that teachers who disagreed with it just avoided the subject entirely.
As an attendee of a Northeastern Ohio Catholic elementary school, it was all Dunning for me. I don't remember how I learned a bit of the actual history, but I suspect it was decades after I was out of school. Certainly "Dunning School" is a thing I've only heard of recently.
It's kind of not something that covers either side in glory.
"We trade black voting away to get Hayes" isn't really a good bargain even for a casual racist.
'it is hopelessly naive to think that slavery was the cause of the Civil War'
We definitely got that as well. I assume it was kind of a perfect confluence of a genuine desire to tell a more complex story, mindless belief that being contrarian = being sophisticated, and confederate apologists pushing their agenda.
I blame the Civil War on Gary Busey.
He has documented links to high ranking rebels.
I think we covered Reconstruction, but neutrally at best--it was a weird complex boring thing (relative to the war) that ended up not mattering much, moving on. This was a year when I had an moron unhappy with his job for a social studies teacher and can't remember much of it.
'it is hopelessly naive to think that slavery was the cause of the Civil War'
Arghhh. What's worse than racist bullshit? Patronising racist bullshit.
I am sorry to report that Dunning has a foothold across the Atlantic as well. I got such a smug, steaming helping of "the Civil War wasn't *really* about slavery," with a side of "Americans don't know history" from a friend-of-friend, who should have known better, after we all went to see Birth of a Nation* together that I can't bring myself to be cordial toward her at social events any more.
*The DW Griffith one, which, if you haven't seen it, is hair-raising.
A little more anecdata: I was, in fact, taught that the Civil War was about slavery. It's just that villainous Yankees took advantage of the South during Reconstruction.
30
I still hear that from people who grew up a lot later than I did (we got the Dunning story). Worse, they get really angry when I disagree.
I certainly never encountered what you're calling Dunning as doctrine, in Ohio in the sixties. I remember controversies would sometimes be presented in dialogue form, so that a Northerner would say this and a Southerner could reply with that, but the whole thrust of the history was that slavery put the North & South on a collision course. Missouri Compromise, Kansas-Nebraska, Fugitive Slave: none make sense as focuses of American History outside that understanding. That there were rationalizations of slavery was part of the story, including would-be "Tory" critiques of Capitalism.
I know I always paid more attention to this stuff than most people, so classmates may have had a different perception, not picking up the themes like I would have.
On Reconstruction, I'd say that "dropping the ball" would describe the gist of what we learned. The reasons for that were certainly touched on, but the takeaway could have been summarized as "unfinished business," and to the extent that the contemporary civil rights movement was ever mentioned in was in that context.
There was some dude on Reddit who stated that death is a good thing because if it was not for death people would live forever with out being enlightened on the new thing everybody needs to get enlightened on.
