FemSem

Very funny! One looks like Mandy (sort of)

Newly Discovered Trove of Vermeer Works Reveals He Painted Mainly Dogs A cache of 243 paintings found in an English castle, all depicting canine subjects, suggests Vermeer’s true aspiration was to become a dog portraitist.

https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/62dtt8rt9780252041730.html

Keisha Lindsay's comments on her new book:

The Perils and the Possibilities of All-Black Male Schools
What do Louis Farrakhan, George H. W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Mark Zuckerberg have in common? They are examples of the strange political bedfellows in support of separate, public schools for black boys.

As a public school graduate and one of the few black women faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I know what discrimination in the classroom looks like. So, when I first heard about the effort to establish ABMSs, I was relieved that school districts were finally listening to anti-racist activists’ assertion that structural racism in schools is unacceptable. In other words, I situated the push to open ABMSs within black people’s well-established understanding of the classroom as a place for resisting racism. To this end, proponents of the forty-plus ABMSs established since 1991 rightly argue that: black urban schools are under-resourced relative to white suburban ones; traditional public schools utilize racist curricula; blacks students are disciplined more than white students, and black teachers are under-represented in the nation’s schools.

At the same time, the anti-feminist ethos sometimes present in Lives Matter and other expressions of black politics is also evident in conversations about ABMSs. It is unsurprising then that my initial optimism about ABMSs soon turned to concern. Why? Because I recognized that despite their best intentions, some advocates of ABMSs minimize the degree of black girls’ own oppression in school. Equally disturbing, is many ABMSs supporters’ assumption that black schoolboys underperform because they are distracted by black girls. This claim reproduces harmful images of black women as “jezebels” who sexually corrupt the males around them.

There is much to learn from the movement to open ABMSs. One lesson is that intersectionality - the analytical framework pioneered by black feminists to illuminate how racial, gendered, and other systems of power are mutually reinforcing can be used to advance multiple political agendas including anti-feminist ones. On the one hand, many advocates of AMBSs embrace intersectionality when they assume that black boys underachieve not only because they are black in racist schools but also because they are black boys in white, female-dominated classrooms. This intersectional logic highlights black boys’ experience of gender-specific racism or the fact that the nation’s predominantly white women teachers suspend black boys at higher rates than other students, including black girls. On the other hand, numerous advocates of ABMSs assume that black boys underachieve because white women teachers create racist, “feminized” classrooms at odds with these boys’ “naturally” aggressive learning style. This intersectional approach ignores research which indicates that biology does not automatically make boys tactile learners and girls oral learners. The end result is that supporters of ABMSs often ignore black children, including highly verbal black boys, who defy stereotypical gender roles.

So where does this reality, that the push for ABMSs is anti-racist and sexist, leave those of us committed to challenging inequality in our personal, activist, and/or professional lives? I believe that supporters and critics of AMBSs can form politically progressive coalitions. This might seem like an unrealistic goal given that advocates of ABMSs sometimes reject black feminist criticism of their efforts. Indeed, black feminists who express concerns about these schools have heard that we are “colluding with the enemy” or giving racist whites the opportunity to condemn ABMSs and, in turn, stifle black boys’ academic prospects. It is also true, however, that while many proponents of ABMSs conceptualize black children’s oppression in ways that threaten bridge building, other advocates recognize that the sometimes sexist and heterosexist rhetoric in favor of these schools harms black boys and black girls.

Building on this insight ultimately requires all participants in the debate about ABMSs to embrace a particular kind of educational advocacy - one which recognizes that public schools are key to addressing oppression and that black children are forced to learn in some of the worst public schools. Putting this kind of nuanced advocacy into practice means using accessible, community-based spaces to challenge our assumptions and demands regarding how and why black children are oppressed in school. It also means defining “good” public schools as those which foster all black children’s capacity for self-determination and self-actualization in the classroom, and beyond.

My comments: It's a great read about democracy, feminism, schools and intersectional politics. 🙂

In a Classroom of Their Own: The Intersection of Race and Feminist Politics in All-Black Male Schools Antifeminist and antiracist currents within an education reform movement

Congratulations to our own Michelle Robinson, winner of an Outstanding Women of Color Award at UW-Madison! http://www.news.wisc.edu/23006?utm_source=iUW&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=iUW2014-07-22

Eight honored by UW–Madison as Outstanding Women of Color Eight winners of the 2014-15 Outstanding Women of Color awards, who are heavily involved in the campus as well as the Madison community through their work toward research and civic enrichment, have been announced by UW–Madison.