"Gayness, Multicultural Education and Community"
By Dennis Carlson
Quotes:
1) "Within normalizing communities, some individuals and subject positions (i.e., white, middle class, male, heterosexual, etc.) get privileged and represented as "normal" while other individuals and subject positions (i.e., black, working class, female, homosexual, etc.) are disempowered and represented as deivant, sick, neurotic, criminal, lazy, lacking in intelligence, and in other ways "abnormal."
- This quote bothered me so much I cannot even describe with words how angry it made me. The people that populate this country are simply ignorant and ruthless if they think someone is neurotic or sick just because they are homosexual or black. I hate how disgustingly true this quote holds to be and it makes me lose all hope that this world will ever get better in accepting everyone. To label someone as "lacking intelligence" just because they are gay or female is absolutely absurd and to think that being a woman makes me "lazy" or "criminal" boggles my mind. Yet, there are people out there who believe this crap and it just infuriates me.
2) "...analysis needs to proceed through an account of the specific techniques and apparatuses of power that have been employed in the school to keep gayness 'in its place' as an invisible presence."
-This quote really made me mad because it is saying that schools feel it is important to keep gayness to a minimum and hide it as much as possible. Why? What is so important about a person's sexuality that an entire schools system would try to keep it concealed and out of public eye? It just really gets to me that a school would really try to cover up something that really should not make a difference. So much for this being a free country.
3)"Throughout this century, one of the primary means of ensuring that gayness was an invisible presence in the school was through the dismissal of teachers who were found out to be homosexuals."
-This quote was the bottom line for me. I cannot believe that some schools will actually go to the extreme of letting go a teacher just because they found out he/she was gay. That is just ridiculously stupid and immoral that a school would actually do such a thing just to keep gayness hidden from their students. Well folks, just because you're trying to hide it does not make it go away. After I read this part of the article I was too frustrated to continue reading.
I was also really mad when reading this article. We feel like we live in a country where we are more accepting of different groups of people but really we are far from it.
ReplyDeleteI am pretty sure this happened in my high school. One of the new English teachers was a bit flamboyant, but well-liked by the students and the kids really learned. Yet somehow, he was cut at the end of the year, while some of the HORRIBLE English teachers who have been teaching the same way for the past 30 years remain. There's SO MUCH MORE to someone than their sexual preference!!!
ReplyDeleteI agree with Amanda. It is a sad reality to accept. Yet we still haven't accepted that we aren't as great a country as we are led to believe.
ReplyDeleteWe should accept people for who they are. We should be more accepting of other people because we do live in a free country, and we have rights to be who we want to be.
ReplyDelete