I’m have been thinking cyclically about three things lately: the way Kendrick Lamar’s presentation of self is similar to Baby Suggs, an exploration (I wanna move away from English teachers using the word “argument”) against the classics, and an exploration of the sexist roots of the recent attack against teachers and their curriculum in the United States.
On top of that, ever since she died, I’ve been thinking: bell hooks is the GOAT. 🐐
In her effort toward freedom, she never skipped the opportunity to name the structures she was up against. It became her trademark: “white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.”
Here is the chapter from her book, Teaching to Transgress. This flows down the stream (maybe IS the stream?) of arguments against Standard English taught in classrooms (WTF is a standard, anyway?!) as the only acceptable, intelligible form of English.
My favorite little glimpse into her breaking down the value of English throughout history is when she refers to “broken English” as the language most often spoken by people who have been displaced due to the white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy: “The power of this speech is not simply that it enables resistance to white supremacy, but that it also forges a space for alternative cultural production and alternative epistemologies-different ways of thinking and knowing that were crucial to creating a counter-hegemonic worldview” (171).
Decolonizing curriculum means stepping away from a standard that is rooted in whiteness. A curriculum that decenters it and also works to acknowledge different ways of thinking and teaching that the historical pedagogies rooted in linear thinking.
Let’s unlock our genius together. It has been waiting.
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