Swirling in Whiteness

I finished reading  The Skin We're In by Desmond Cole last night. It enlightened me on a number of subjects, reminded me of some recent events, and made me aware of some events I didn't know had happened. It helped me solidify some ideas and unlearn/relearn some things. I still have some questions though. I'm here to learn and I want to be able to call out specific examples of systemic racism, so here are some of the examples Cole discusses in his book.  Carding is a police policy that includes stopping individuals for no apparent reason and collecting their personal information and the people they associate with, which is then stored in a database for no specific reason to be used for whatever reason in the future. I don't begin to understand who conceived of this policy, but I'd like to learn more. I hope to learn more about this topic from Robyn Maynard's book Policing Black Lives . Where did it come from? How would anyone think this would do anything but cr...

I've been thinking about the metaphor I described in my second post -- how all this learning is like taking a sip of something new, swirling it around in my mouth, and then experiencing the complexity of it. I know this isn't anything new, but what hit me today is a slightly different way of looking at this. I take in a new awareness of something or learn something new, and then I see how that learning bumps up against or mixes with what I already know, and then with the clarity I find I am forced to unlearn something or build on something. The fact that once you know you can't pretend you don't is so profound here because every little bit of learning I do seems to be changing the landscape of my schema in some way, big or small. It doesn't matter as long as I keep going. That's why I'm here. 

As I started working my way through the course work for my masters degree, I began to develop an understanding that there are many different ways of knowing the world. The way we roll in the western world is quite normalized for us, so it's difficult for us to understand that it is, in fact, Eurocentric.  A good example of this is our school system in Canada, which includes bells and schedules and cohorting by age. Ringing bells and following schedules in schools was incorporated into the school system by Europeans in order to train children to be able to punch a clock when they became adults and joined the workforce in the newly industrialized world. It hasn't changed since the beginning of the industrial revolution, regardless of the fact that the world is quite different now and many adults don't punch clocks. (The late Sir Ken Robinson explains this well in his Ted Talk .)  And this isn't the way the entire world works, as much as we would like to think that it is. ...