Khari > Recent Status Updates

Good intentions are never enough

That's his interpretation of what that woman is thinking, that is his hypothesis. Why is being accepted as fact?

For all he knows she was raped and robbed at gunpoint two days ago by someone who looked just like him.

For all he knows she reacts this way to every single man who walks into a jewelry store by himself.

How often do men just walk into jewelry stores by themselves? That's actually a genuine question.

ever stop to consider the experiences of the other person involved? No. Instead she pats herself on the back and talks about how she 'loves that uncomfortable silence' when she guides her students to the utterly simplistic conclusion that the reason this woman has brought out her dog is because 'he's black, she's scared of him because he's black, because white women are supposed to be scared of black men."

by a gang of black men before. It's entirely possible. Should she then conclude that all black men are violent robbers? No, but in her personal experience up to date if that's what has happened to her, she is justified in thinking it might happen again. But did this professor, who has constantly been talking about how the impact of a narrative can change depending on the experience of the reader,

Why does this narrative suddenly take on the status of incontrovertible fact? Just because that's his interpretation of the experiences he had?

Then she goes on to talk about the lady who pulls a Doberman out on him because he walks into a jewelry store. You know what. I agree, that's going a bit far, but you know what? You don't know and he doesn't know what that woman has been through, maybe she's been robbed

But here she gets to feel superior for making young women who are just running probabilities in their head feel guilty for doing so and make them feel as if they are the scum of the earth because they are operating on the only information that they have on hand, the stories on the nightly news.

Gah. It's infuriating. It goes against everything she's been saying before.

the world because I thought a Japanese guy was following me too closely. There is nothing racist about it. She states with some triumph that she can get her class to admit that if it was a white grandmother then they wouldn't run away. No duh. She's a grandmother. It wouldn't matter if she was black or green, she's OLD and not male. The likelihood that she would turn out to be a danger is statistically infinitesimal.

...he intends her no harm, as the professor insists?

All she has to go on is the fact that there was a rape of a young white woman in this area last week. She's never met this man, she doesn't know a thing about him except that he is bigger and stronger than she is. I would do the same thing, regardless of if he was black, white, brown or green. I have turned into convenience stores in Japan, the safest nation in

...just how racist the initial woman and they themselves are for this reaction. Because after all, they aren't running away from her in the classroom right now.

What a specious argument! The situations are completely different. One is a woman alone, at night, in by his own words, a deserted area in London, where black men represent a disproportional amount of violent crime. How the hell is she supposed to know that

Case in point: She is talking about how she assigns the essay Black men in Public Spaces by Brent Staples to her class of students that are inevitably a majority of white women and how they are all initially on the side of the white woman in his initial anecdote who ends up running away from him as he minds his own business walking behind her. Obviously she must to deconstruct their reaction and point out...

A valiant undertaking I'm sure, but when you've been pushing the very applaudable idea that a narrative can be interpreted differently by the different people who are reading it who have different life experiences, and then you pat yourself on the back for consistently leading entire classes to a SINGLE approved interpretation of a narrative, I lose all respect for you.

I was enjoying this book. Clearly Ms. Reed and I are very similar in many ways, including our insatiable need to consume the written word.

But I am just plain irritated right now.

I am so tired of being condescended to in this book. It's been a constant stream of, 'let me tell you another way to see this particular narrative' 'let me open your mind in another way' 'let me guide you to a new viewpoint'.

Lies are merely a patina one places over words, a type of dance, a verbal performance. They do not change what is. They merely change what is believed, and one can change the beliefs of fools easily.

"If we had to explain even the sense of bodily hunger to a person who had never felt it, we should be hard put to it for words."

"For a manifestation of the influence exerted by the psychical upon the physical we need in fact go no further than the power of our will to move our body-the power, that is, of a spiritual cause to bring about a mechanical effect. There assuredly is an absolutely insoluble riddle, and it is only the fact that we have grown so used to it that prevents it from seeming a miracle to us."

I...don't get humor.

I don't know why these are considered funny.

Another whopper of an assumption, if teachers are teaching using students' preferred learning styles, they will engage better and learn better.

Is it that no one read it in its entirety and just pulls out the one quote that seems to sort of match what they want to say and then ignore the rest?

He says "Morrison, based on observations by psychedelics and shamanism researcher Terence McKenna, as well as calendrical predictions of the Maya, determines that the [next stage of evolution of the world] will come sometime around 2012"

Yes, because clearly shamans, mushroom eaters, and the Maya could predict the end of a society that didn't exist when they did...

How? How is this book considered scholarship?