Will Start Small

“Some say that there is no tragedy in the slipping away of Black Los Angeles. It isn’t just happening here. In many major U.S. cities, the Black working poor are being moved to the hinterlands. And the Black working and middle class have been given the message to just move back to the South, where we were once enslaved.”

The Black Los Angeles I grew up with is slipping away For my parents, L.A. was a place of progress and opportunity. But today, especially for poor and working-class Black people, it's a disappointment.

Today, New America’s Early & Elementary Education Policy program and the National Wildlife Federation’s Early Childhood Health Outdoors (ECHO) program release state and federal policy recommendations to build outdoor learning opportunities that help young children thrive. These policy recommendations can help state and federal leaders to promote healthy child development, support the early childhood workforce, and enhance health equity in communities.

Federal and State Policy Recommendations to Improve Outdoor Learning in Child Care Investing in outdoor learning improves child care quality, supports the early childhood workforce, and enhances health equity

“In the Black community teachers are greatly respected. Research shows Black people are more for funding schools than any other racial group. The US made it illegal for us to read, so when you are recruiting a Black person from the Black community to teach we don’t realize you just want a punching bag. We may have gone through the same racist schools we are being asked to teach at, but owing to our history —the request is an honor, so how we are treated is especially cruel and heinous. We don’t understand how this could be an even worse environment than when we snuck and taught people to read or when we had segregated schools and the Klan terrorized us —but it is. Because the system actively does what ever it can to ruin Black children and if you are a Black teacher that loves Black children it will ruin you too. We need policy changes, we need these white supremacist and antiblack schools dismantled.”--Lark Sontag

Flesch book came out one year after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Racists, who would rather have no public schools than integrated ones, used Flesch’s book and studies to argue that U.S. inequities were owing to inferior teaching methods by bad women teachers and poor study habits of Black students.

So Dr. Seuss was part of the “disruption” that took place in education once it was no longer legal to discriminate against Black children.

We all know the bizarre racist and ableist teaching techniques that eugenics flavored standardization creates — “Cat in the Hat” was the beginning of that.

It was supposed to be a fun way for children to learn reading....

Cat in the Hat is racist, it's a caricature of a Black man in the 1920s Of course people change, but clearly the only thing Seuss changed was his name. Seuss made an entire children't book series based on the stereotype of Black man jazz musician.