(I’m republishing posts on my My All-Time Favorite Posts list. This one appeared in 2019. You can see them all here.)
You may have already heard about the terrible (and recently pulled) commercial from Ancestry.com that utterly missed the boat on the rapes whites regularly inflicted on enslaved people (I’ve embedded a tweet below that shows it).
NPR had a good piece on it titled Companies Continue To Stumble Over Racially Offensive Advertising Campaigns where they interviewed NY Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones.
She called for more people of color to be involved in these kinds of advertising campaigns to avoid this mistakes, and also did not let “white people off the hook” (as you can see from the quote at the top of this post).
That’s an important message for us white educators, too.
It’s not fair or just that we white educators have to be called on our biases (see We Should Be Obsessed With Racial Equity) by our students of color, their parents, or our colleagues of color.
I am thankful that people from all three of those groups have challenged my missteps.
However, I know that I really have to do a much better job of not only being more self-aware of my behavior and equity issues in general, but also be more deliberate in raising these issues with my white colleagues.
I suspect I’m not alone in having to to improve in that area….
Here’s the NPR interview, followed by the video:
ooooh my god LMAOOO who approved this ancestry commercial??? pic.twitter.com/Isy0k4HTMA
— manny (@mannyfidel) April 18, 2019
You might also be interested in New & Revised: Resources To Help Us Predominantly White Teachers To Reflect On How Race Influences Our Work.
(I’m republishing posts on my My All-Time Favorite Posts list. This one appeared in 2019. You can see them all here.) You may have already heard about the terrible (and recently pulled) commercial from Ancestry.com that utterly missed the boat on the rapes whites regularly inflicted on enslaved people (I’ve embedded a tweet below a look back Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…
