10:50pm February 12, 2012

➸ Bitter Grapes: things i wish i'd learned in high school

lovebelikeawhirlwind:

1. everything in your history books, with few exceptions, is filtered through the lens of white Eurocentric eliminationst thought. you will only learn what a board of educators, working with a biased, racist agenda, decide is fit for you to know unless you go out and educate yourself. unless you sit down, shut up, and listen to other voices
2. history is not something you absorb and passively take in. history is something you wrest from the mountains of bullshit, something you piece together from bits here and there, something you follow in a patchwork pattern, not a linear progression, something you are constantly expounding on and working with.
3. the contributions of marginalized groups do not exist in high school history except as tokens there to contribute to a vision of sanitized and non-threatening ‘diversity’. whatever marginalized group you belong to, you will not see any realistic representation of it in class or in texts.
4. the most beautiful truths to be found in global literature are unlikely to be found in your required texts.
5. sometimes it is not about learning, but unlearning, and recognizing your privileges and dismantling them. this is not a process with an end. this is a process you choose to engage in for the rest of your life. it is not meant to be easy or comfortable. it is meant to hurt, to disrupt, to be real.
6. people have a vested interest in keeping you ignorant.

This bothers me. Like bothers me a lot. Not just about history but about everything. It seems like it ought to be possible, on any subject imaginable, to easily be able to look it up and find just about every culture in the world’s take on it (as well as every culture’s take on how, if at all, subjects are to be divided), at least among cultures willing to share that information with others.

Instead we get this weird white Western (and very specific kinds of white and Western) warped lens that, even when it’s as right as it can get, has a huge distorting effect because of the energy it takes to shut out the rest of the world. And yet most people from within this system just call this stuff “knowledge” and “history” and “science” and all kinds of other things, as if it’s universal. And it’s just horribly painful to watch that distorting effect not only pretending that it’s the only thing out there, but also, when it recognizes other cultures at all, distorting those as well into various combinations of artificially idealized and artificially demonized forms. The whole thing makes me feel sick. Not just metaphorically either, there’s actual nausea involved.

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