The Un-Fair Campaign

Hello Friends,

I want to share with you this new website and project of the Un-Fair Campaign, a group from Duluth, Minnesota. They have created a series of billboards, bus signs and public service announcements to educate the community about white privilege and racism. Their website has a wealth of links and resources. Take a look. My children found the posters particularly interesting and they provoked some great conversations in our family. 

Fondly, Josie

Teaching tolerance

Hello Friends,


I want to point your attention to a wonderful website maintained by the Southern Poverty Law Center,  Teaching Tolerance. It is a resource for teachers and parents and describes itself as "a place to find thought-provoking news, conversation and support for those who care about diversity, equal opportunity and respect for differences in schools."  I subscribe to the e-news which comes out every other week or so with excellent links and short blurbs. One of my favorite links in a recent e-news was this one: Sorting People from the PBS, Race: Power of an Illusion website. The teacher describes using the exercise in her 6th grade class. Click onto the Sorting People link yourself and give it a try. You may be surprised at the results.


When I first started reading the Teaching Tolerance website, I was moved by the writing, but felt a little underwhelmed by the title. Mere tolerance seemed a pretty low bar, a state of disdainful acceptance and gritted teeth reserved for annoying things like long bathroom lines or mosquitoes. Surely we can do better than just barely tolerate each other? Then I thought about how the word is used in immunology in the sense of tolerance to allergies. I read a recent interesting medical paper in JAMA which talked about childhood food allergies and the idea that a window of opportunity existed in childhood to expose children to allergens and to promote food tolerance.  The keys for healthy food tolerance, according to this paper, were early, progressive (larger and larger amounts), and persistent exposure. Maybe the same is true for the development of empathy and our ability to perceive our common humanity. While I believe that the window of opportunity doesn't shut after childhood, I do not doubt that a commitment to social equity requires progressive and persistent exposure, learning, and reflection.


Cheers to all who continue on this journey,


Josie

Social Class and Wealth

We had a Parent Diversity Roundtable today on the topic of social class and wealth in the United States. It was well attended, and although we really only scratched the surface in the 90 minutes allotted, it was a good beginning. 

First we estimated how wealth is currently distributed in the United States between the 5 population quintiles and then estimated an ideal wealth distribution for maximizing societal well-being. We then compared our composite responses to actual US wealth distribution, with surprising and discomforting results. Our results mirrored the findings in this article, What We Know About Wealth  from Harvard magazine in which two professors performed the same exercise for a large sample of Americans. 

We viewed Richard Wilkinson: How economic inequality harms societies, an excellent 16 minute clip from a TED talk which examines the significant negative societal impact of income inequality within prosperous democratic societies. 

We discussed the ways in which working class and poor people are both condescended to and feared in our society. These two short pieces, The anger of a first-generation student , an essay from a working class student at Wellesley College and an excerpt from Nickel and Dimed in America by Barbara Ehrenreich's book of same title give two perspectives from a working class viewpoint. 

Looking forward to further discussions!

Josie