A group of parents in Oberlin, Ohio, are aiming to dissuade their local high school from allowing a white teacher to teach a black history course. This problem arose due to a scheduling conflict which could force "the district to reassign the black teacher who has taught the course for seven years."
Here are what professionals in the region have to say:
Using a white teacher at Oberlin High School would send the wrong message to black students, said A.G. Miller, an associate professor of American and African religious history at Oberlin College.
"The message is that we are not concerned about the importance of your historical background ... that that is less important than a schedule conflict," said Miller, whose three children graduated from Oberlin High School.
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Michael Williams, interim director of Cleveland State University's black studies program, said schools should choose a black teacher if that person is most qualified, not just because the teacher happens to be black.
If two teachers are equally qualified, Williams gives the edge to the black teacher. "That person still has the advantage of the culture," said Williams, who is black. "They understand the nuances of the culture."
Phyllis Yarber Hogan, a member of the Oberlin Black Alliance for Progress, said a white teacher wouldn't be well-suited to teaching students about subjects like slavery.
"When you talk about slavery, students need to understand it is not our fault," she said. "Our ancestors did nothing wrong to be enslaved. "
"How do you work through that when the person teaching it is the same type of person who did the enslaving?"
While I agree there is probably a lot to be said for having a positive role model teaching *any* subject to students, Ms. Hogan's statements are just mind-numbing foolery. Maybe the new white teacher has a new perspective to bring to this class, having (probably) studied this cirriculum as an outsider. Isn't it just as likely that the new white teacher is a decendant of radical abolitionists? What better perspective to bring to a discussion of slavery than to introduce the problem of the Constitution, which William Lloyd Garrison characterized as "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell" ?
Original article can be found
here, brought to my attention via the Wall Street Journal's daily 'Best of the Web' e-mail.
