The “notion that communities of color have fundamentally different kinds of knowledge” is racist and ahistorical.
Abstract thinking “is the heritage of humanity,” she writes. It’s not a “white thing.”
Standardized tests are a “racist weapon,” argues Ibram X. Kendi, a history professor at the University of Florida. “What if the intellect of a poor, low testing Black child in a poor Black school is different—and not inferior—to the intellect of a rich, high-testing White child in a rich White school?” he asks.
“Gathering knowledge of abstract items, from words to equations, that have no relation to our everyday lives has long been the amusement of the leisured elite,” writes Kendi. He prefers to measure literacy “by how knowledgeable individuals are about their ownenvironment.”
A Mexican-American and a first-generation college graduate, Liz Reetz teaches sixth-grade social studies. Testing shows how “our schools are not educating all students,” she writes on A Plus Colorado.
She “built a curriculum based on teaching students to think, read, talk, and write about history as it relates to identity and social justice,” she writes. Her non-elite students can handle abstractions, if they have “the opportunity to engage with ideas that are meaningful to them.”
Kendi’s ideas are dangerous, she believes.
“Equally intelligent in different ways” says to me: value survival skills in poor and brown people but leave the thinking about big ideas, governing, or improving the world to wealthy people and white people.
. . . You give the power to white teachers, white administrators, white legislators to say “you can’t hold me accountable for the fact that he can’t read, his intelligence is different” or “It’s not my fault she isn’t grasping algebra, her culture doesn’t value numbers or abstract thinking.”
The “notion that communities of color have fundamentally different kinds of knowledge” is racist and ahistorical, writes Reetz.
Pre-Columbian societies tracked the movements of stars and planets, understood complex mathematics, used chemistry and biology to create rubber, and engineered roads and buildings. Do not tell me that my culture doesn’t value abstract thinking.
Abstract thinking “is the heritage of humanity,” she writes. It’s not a “white thing.”