Maybe I could issue a Request For Proposal to provide thousands of bibles to Oklahoma schools that almost absolutely guarantees that Trump gets a cut?
Of course, first, we have to get around a few roadblocks.
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Nov 16, 2024
Today's Belle
So, if I'm expecting the federal education dollars to dry up, how do I go about securing what few dollars will come my way?
Jun 27, 2024
A Letter To Louisiana
Who knew you could solve all of society's problem with a single simple idea like posting the 10 commandments.
Won't wonders never cease.
May 8, 2024
Today I Learned
I learned two things today.
A small Durango college is trying to reckon with its dark legacy — and help students do the same
Fort Lewis College, which awards the most degrees to Native American students of any four-year college in the nation, was once a boarding school that used severe methods to “civilize” Indigenous children
DURANGO — On a breezy March morning, with the scent of sourdough perfuming the air, three Hozhoni Days Powwow ambassadors, one past and two present, gathered at Bread cafe for eggs and avocado toast and to talk about the year they’d just lived through, emotional and taxing.
Jordyn Begay, Selena Gonzales and Audrey Leonetti are students at Fort Lewis College, one of six Native American-serving nontribal universities in the United States and the only one in Colorado.
Begay is Diné from Teec Nos Pos, Arizona, Leonetti is Yupik from Anchorage, Alaska, and Gonzales is “Mud Clan born from the Hispanic people,” also from a small community on the Navajo Nation about 35 minutes from Begay’s home.
The women were buzzing with excitement. Today was the culmination of the 58th annual Hozhoni Days Powwow, which celebrates Indigenous arts, culture and student scholarship. The Hozhoni Days Exhibition, a competition centered on students’ knowledge of Native American customs and beliefs, is a key component of the celebration. At the powwow in a few hours, the outgoing ambassador, Begay, and the incoming ambassadors, Leonetti and Gonzales, were going to be honored.
Another entry point for this story is the day in 2019 when Joslynn Lee, a Fort Lewis chemistry professor who is enrolled Pueblo Laguna and also of Acoma Laguna and Diné affiliation, bicycled past a panel beaming out from the clock tower in the middle of campus.
The panel showed photographs from the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School in which the students were depicted as being in good hands. Under a headline that read “Walking a New Road” the text described the school as “receiving high praise for its ‘extremely good literary instruction’ and ‘excellent work’ in all industrial departments.” It showed a boy’s baseball team, which did exist, and students in a classroom with their hands in their laps. “The children are all ‘well-clothed and happy,’” the panel read. A practical education was stressed.
Lee remembered seeing the same panels when she was a Fort Lewis student in 2002. She knew a different story, one in which forced assimilation, abuse and physical struggle were the norm. So she approached Fort Lewis College president Tom Stritikus to discuss removing the panels.
Their discussion turned into a year of talks with a “thoughtful community collective,” of Indigenous faculty, staff and student representatives, Lee said. It culminated with a public healing ceremony and removal of the panels in front of hundreds in September 2021.
Shotton said the panel removal kicked off a major effort “to reconcile the dark history of FLC” and emphasize opportunities to educate people “about the atrocities and continued impact of the boarding school era.”
But Leonetti and Gonzales, who enrolled at Fort Lewis after the panel removal, say the school could be doing a better job at relaying the history of the institution to prospective and new students.
Leonetti says she did not know when she enrolled that Fort Lewis is linked to the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School, or that historical reports indicate Native students died while in attendance and some of their remains are likely still on the original “Old Fort” campus where some classes are held. Ground-penetrating radar was used to examine the cemetery site and identified 46 graves believed to be children, more than the 31 children History Colorado’s archival research found who did not return home from Fort Lewis and are likely buried there.
Old Fort is 20 minutes from Durango in Hesperus. The 6,000 acres it sits on is owned by Colorado State Land Board and managed by Fort Lewis. A highly regarded farmer-in-training program operates there, and students from other school disciplines are often invited to visit.
Begay said as a Diné tribal member, she “traditionally isn’t allowed” to visit sites where her ancestors are buried. But during her first year, she went on a tour of the Old Fort without being told about the boarding school trauma. She says she went into one of the buildings and saw photos of the students and “was very emotional and I was, like, I don’t know why I’m so emotional. Then my first year was the worst year I’ve ever had because I was mentally, physically and emotionally not doing really well.
“So obviously I had to do a ceremony,” she said, referring to the traditional Diné healing ceremony for individuals suffering from emotional distress. During her ceremony, healers “told me where I went — I wasn’t supposed to go there.” (Other Native students, including Diné, have reported having positive experiences learning farming techniques at the 6,000-acre property.)
Leonetti said she had no idea about the boarding school when she arrived from Alaska last fall and was stunned when an email from school leadership circulated that informed her, “Oh, by the way, Oct. 3, this report is gonna come out. I really, honestly didn’t know about it at all, especially being from so far away. Like, I wasn’t in the region to know that that had happened.”
Though three generations of her family attended Fort Lewis, Gonzales added that she was only “slightly aware” of the boarding school history and has been struggling with the History Colorado discoveries since they were released a few months into her freshman year.
Making Fort Lewis more inclusive
When Stritikus came on as Fort Lewis’ president in 2018, he entered a college trying to understand its history.
The school had a troubled past when it came to its dealings with minorities. From 1962 to 1994, for instance, its mascot was the Raider, a cavalry soldier wielding a flag and riding a horse into what one assumes is battle (notably, cavalry soldiers killed 160 Cheyenne and Arapaho at the Sand Creek Massacre in 1862).
The mascot then became the Skyhawk, a concept combining the hawk, a raptor known for its soaring flight and sharp vision, and sky, a nod to the 247-acre campus’ 6,872-foot-high perch on a bluff above the town of Durango.
Spurred on by Lee and building on work Indigenous faculty and staff had been doing, Stritikus decided to dig into the college’s troubled past and create a new vision for Fort Lewis.
It started in 2019 with the establishment of the Committee on FLC History and a multi-year conversation about the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School and its historical impact on Indigenous students and communities. Fort Lewis also consulted with multiple tribes in the rewording of its land acknowledgement recognizing them as the original stewards of the boarding school and college lands “to give it a living perspective,” Lee said. The school’s board of trustees created a “resolution on commitment to reconciliation” that “supports and endorses a comprehensive approach focused on healing, maintaining respectful and reciprocal relationships with Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities, and caring for Indigenous students at Fort Lewis College.”
A tribal advisory council now provides opportunities to students from tribal nations and communities, explores opportunities to collaborate and partner with them, and keeps them up-to-date on the school’s reconciliation work regarding the federal boarding school history.
And there was the removal of the panels, which Lee ultimately gets credit for.
During this period “was the discovery of the mass graves in Canada,” Stritikus said. “That’s what set us on the course to really involve tribal nations more directly. To say, ‘Hey, this is not just Fort Lewis. You need to make this decision with us.’” This is why they backed House Bill 1327, which was signed by Polis at Fort Lewis, he said.
But none of these significant steps toward reconciliation prepared students for the History Colorado report.
Students, the report and Fort Lewis’ support
Begay remembers a heaviness enveloping the campus once the report came out. Students were invited to meet in the Native American Center with Shotton, Stritikus and faculty from in the Center for Indigenous Research, Culture and Language space. Faculty from the sociology department and representatives from the Sexual Assault Services Organization also came. The group went through the report in detail. It took four hours.
“It was very hard reading the report, knowing my people were the highest number to go to the boarding school,” Begay said. Navajo students outnumbered others by more than three times at the school. “That was the hardest thing because I didn’t think it was that many. It was also a very emotional day across the school and we were crying together.”
Begay texted her mother and then called her. “And I started crying because I was like, this is what they did to our relatives, Mom. This is what they done to us. And the first person I thought of was my grandma, who went to boarding school but she barely talks about it. She told me a few things that they did do to her but it wasn’t as harsh as what she was seeing her classmates getting. But I tend to see with my grandma how it definitely impacted her.”
“But I feel like the faculty were like, ‘Oh, this happened, but you guys have schoolwork,’” she continued. “And we were like, ‘We understand, we understand that.’
“But they also needed to understand that our people never came back and we are intertwined together,” she added. “Knowing we were experiencing that and knowing some professors were, like, ‘You still have a paper to do, you still have an exam to do.’ No, they did not get it.”
Leonetti said the day after the report came out, none of her teachers talked about it in class. “None of them even acknowledged it. I didn’t go to classes all day the day it was released, and I had one professor mark me as absent — even though there was a facultywide email sent out telling faculty to give students leniency. So I had to go talk to that professor and explain like, ‘Hey, I was kind of going through it that day. You’re supposed to excuse me.’”
And Gonzales said while the Native American Indigenous Studies and psychology departments gave her leniency that week, by the following week “it just, they just stopped talking about it. And then, I like to nag people a lot. I like to be very upfront. So every now and then, if we’re talking about a topic, I’ll be, like, ‘Oh, remember the boarding school? Remember when the report came out?’”
Fort Lewis College’s student-run magazine, The Independent, reported that two days after the report was released, administration established a “resilience room” where the school community could “reflect, relax and heal.” Free therapy sessions were offered through the counseling center. And in late October, Jennie Sturm, a geophysical archaeologist History Colorado hired to search the boarding school grounds for graves using ground-penetrating radar, came to Fort Lewis and held a listening session with students to go over her findings.
COVID kept Norton, from History Colorado, from attending but she said there was good turnout and the students were “very engaged.” School administrators “and Dr. Shotton, in particular” were “really concerned about the students and how they were experiencing this and what their perceptions and reactions were and to how best to care for them.”
Begay, Leonetti and Gonzales agree that Stritikus and the Indigenous faculty and staff have been available and supportive throughout the reconciliation process.
“When the president decided, when we all decided, to take the panels down, I remember a lot of my friends that are Native were, like, ‘Oh, that’s a win for us knowing that we’re slowly getting ourselves back, that Fort Lewis is finally listening to us,’” Begay said.
And with the boarding school report, Leonetti said, “I feel like Tom did a really good job. I talked to him the week that happened and he was very supportive.”
When Stritikus heard this feedback during an interview with The Colorado Sun on March 29, he seemed delighted.
“When we started this work, when I came on the campus, what I felt was that for as Indigenous as we were, in a school that had been doing Native American waivers since the beginning of time, the Native American students were not visible in the way that they should be. Thinking way back, this has always been about building an inclusive community for students, and a place where students could show up as their whole selves.”
“So the fact that students met with you and said they both appreciated what the president did but had critiques for the president, that’s awesome,” he added. “Because to me, that says no matter what, at the end of the day, we’ve created a culture where students get to share what they think, show up as who they are and voice their opinions. I’m elated that students are sharing their thoughts with people, as we’ve tried to create that culture from the beginning.”
And as for the school’s response to students in the aftermath of the release, Stritikus said, “our team, certainly on the week the report came out and the week after, did an incredible job of supporting students. So students who feel like, ‘wait a minute. We put this report on the shelf. What’s happening here?’ That’s a fair point we should listen to, but what I also always try to talk about is this is less about history. We’re not a museum. We’re not a historical society. We’re an educational institution.
“So the momentum that should be created from the report is that responsibility Dr. Shotton has so clearly laid out,” he added. “Fort Lewis has an obligation to build in the students those things that the boarding school took away — language, wellness, leadership and Indigenous ways of knowing.”
The mission will have to carry on without Stritikus. He has been hired as president of Occidental College in Los Angeles. His last act at Fort Lewis was presiding over graduation Saturday.
Lee said, “We’re still working through reconciliation as an institution and will even after Tom leaves. It’s in our board of trustees resolution and they are committed to supporting our Indigenous students even as anti-DEI measures are happening in other states.”
Moving through generational trauma into a brighter future
The History Colorado report says collectively, the “suite of negative impacts” inflicted on Native Americans through the federal government’s assimilation process “is often referred to as intergenerational trauma. This is a widely accepted concept that trauma experienced by an individual can be passed down to subsequent generations, psychologically, emotionally and even physically.”
Fort Lewis student Shenay Atene, who is Diné from Monument Valley, Utah, and a psychology major who graduated Saturday, said this trauma is sometimes expressed in drug and alcohol abuse among some Native Americans “and it can lead to everything else, and they can even pass away from it.”
One way Fort Lewis Indigenous students have coped through the reconciliation process is by creating art about their history and experiences.
Atene participated in an exhibit through the Center of Southwest Studies called As Seeds We Grow: Student Reflections on Resilience, which explored student identity and cultural resilience with consideration to the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School history.
The United States has 183 Bureau of Indian Education-funded elementary and secondary schools and residential facilities, of which 55 are bureau-operated and 128 are tribally controlled. They are nothing like the boarding schools of the past.
Atene has a complicated relationship with boarding schools. From first through eighth grade, she attended Kayenta Community School in Kayenta, Arizona. She didn’t want to go; her father made her. He said he wanted her to be independent, but the experience was difficult.
Not in the way the original Native American boarding schools were in Colorado — not even close to that, she said. But as a little girl, she went to bed at night fearing someone would hurt her or steal her. Shenay’s grandparents attended the kind of boarding schools where students were punished for speaking their language. Speaking Navajo was discouraged when her dad, now in his 50s, attended.
Learning details about the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School and relating them to the fact that her parents sent her to a boarding school evoked emotional trauma that Atene needed therapy to process. “I didn’t necessarily need to work through it,” she said, “but to realize what I went through was hard.”
One way she healed at Fort Lewis was through facilitating a traditional sheep butchering on the Old Fort grounds. When reports of Indigenous child abuse started surfacing in Canada, she said, the kill became “much more meaningful.”
“The way the Navajo people heal is through community and that’s through food,” she said. “What better way to process the boarding school information than through traditional foods? Slaughtering a sheep on the old boarding school grounds meant so much more because they couldn’t have that. We really are our ancestors’ wildest dreams.”
In the As Seeds We Grow exhibit, she contributed the traditional Native American jingle dress she wore throughout her childhood, which went with her “from different states to different schools.”
She wore the necklace and belt she danced in starting at age 5. They among the few remaining items she has from her grandmother.
Three paintings she made recall her years in boarding school. The most powerful is called “The Nights,” about which she wrote, “There were always girls that cried through the night, but we never spoke about it with each other. It wasn’t until after a few months of being in Peewee Hall that I accepted that this was my life. This was our life.”
In March, she described the work she did for the exhibit as “healing.” But, she added, at home, where her pieces are now safely stowed, she keeps “The Nights,” which has dark swirls coming out of a door with a window through which she imagined she was being watched, covered with a sheet.
There is still healing to be done. And History Colorado has yet to fulfill its entire mission mandated by House Bill 1327. It is ordered to collect oral histories to help deepen what’s known about the boarding school experience. But Norton doesn’t know if the oral histories are needed.
In the report, she asks the state to “identify the purposes” of them, saying, “It cannot be simply a performative action.”
“Many people note that their parents and grandparents did not speak at great length about their experiences,” she said, cautioning, “oral histories must serve a greater purpose than simply recording the trauma of already victimized people, who do not owe the state their emotions or stories.”
New legislation currently under consideration requests an additional $1 million for History Colorado to continue its research through 2027.
Meanwhile, Atene graduated Saturday and now is off on a journey to become an Indigenous geriatric psychologist, a career she’s inventing to help the elders in her community. She said her experience at Fort Lewis was “amazing because of all the supportive staff and faculty. They helped me learn how to become a leader, embrace my past, and make it a useful tool when helping others.”
When she thought about the momentous occasion, she was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “We’re Native in a Western educational institution. Who would have thought 200 years ago this would have happened? We’re our ancestors’ prayers coming through.”
- Ft Lewis College was where some of my peers went because either they couldn't get in anywhere else, or they just wanted to hang out and ski, and make the 450-mile drive down to Tempe once in a while to score the good weed - the place that was once a somewhat infamous "indian school" that was meant to break kids of their indian ways and turn them into good little white people.
- I learned that the 13 years of public school education I've always been rather proud of, didn't teach me one goddamned thing about any of this.
In my own fuckin' state. Nothing.
Fort Lewis College, which awards the most degrees to Native American students of any four-year college in the nation, was once a boarding school that used severe methods to “civilize” Indigenous children
DURANGO — On a breezy March morning, with the scent of sourdough perfuming the air, three Hozhoni Days Powwow ambassadors, one past and two present, gathered at Bread cafe for eggs and avocado toast and to talk about the year they’d just lived through, emotional and taxing.
Jordyn Begay, Selena Gonzales and Audrey Leonetti are students at Fort Lewis College, one of six Native American-serving nontribal universities in the United States and the only one in Colorado.
Begay is Diné from Teec Nos Pos, Arizona, Leonetti is Yupik from Anchorage, Alaska, and Gonzales is “Mud Clan born from the Hispanic people,” also from a small community on the Navajo Nation about 35 minutes from Begay’s home.
The women were buzzing with excitement. Today was the culmination of the 58th annual Hozhoni Days Powwow, which celebrates Indigenous arts, culture and student scholarship. The Hozhoni Days Exhibition, a competition centered on students’ knowledge of Native American customs and beliefs, is a key component of the celebration. At the powwow in a few hours, the outgoing ambassador, Begay, and the incoming ambassadors, Leonetti and Gonzales, were going to be honored.
But a sense of melancholy set in as the conversation turned to the painful research project History Colorado, under order from Gov. Jared Polis and House Bill 1327, conducted into the abuses and deaths of Native American students at Colorado boarding schools at the turn of the 20th century. Chief among them was the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School, which operated in Hesperus between 1892 and 1909, and later became Fort Lewis College.
For a year starting July 1, 2022, a team of researchers led by History Colorado’s state archeologist Holly Norton spent hundreds of hours examining thousands of archived documents trying to learn what became of children who attended Native American boarding schools across Colorado and to identify those who attended the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School.
Nine federally funded schools in Colorado at the turn of the 20th Century, along with others throughout the U.S., existed to strip Native children of their language, culture and customs “with the intent to destroy Native Americans as a legal identity — and thus incorporating them, and their resources, into American culture,” says the History Colorado report. Or, to use a phrase coined during the National Conference of Charities and Correction in Denver in 1892 by Captain Richard Henry Pratt, who founded the notoriously punishing Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, the intent was to “kill the Indian” and “save the man.”
At Fort Lewis, the methods for attempting to assimilate Native children were severe. Their hair was cut, their traditional clothes taken and their names changed, the report released Oct. 3, 2023, found.
Under Thomas Breen, the Fort Lewis boarding school superintendent from 1894 to 1903, the school maintained a kindergarten class for children as young as 6 despite guidance from Washington that this was too young for children to be separated from their families.
Dangerous living conditions resulted in deadly illnesses like pneumonia and tuberculosis. Physical abuse was rampant, like that inflicted on two young boys forced to sleep in a coal shed on cold winter nights. In 1903, investigative reporter Polly Pry (real name Leonel Ross Campbell) broke a story about Breen sexually abusing and impregnating Native American girls as young as 14. Academic failures kept Native youth from competing with other American children. And while it was standard practice for sick children to be returned home, this was not always possible, and deaths occurred at Fort Lewis and Grand Junction Indian Boarding Schools, the History Colorado report says.
At Fort Lewis College in Durango, around 30% of students are Native American or Alaska Native. They come from more than 110 tribes and villages and receive free tuition based on a mandate created when the federal boarding school was transferred to the state with the agreement that it would become an educational institute that wouldn’t charge tuition for Native American students. Today, the school website says, “the college awards more degrees to Native American students than any other four-year, baccalaureate-granting institution in the nation — about 26% of all degrees awarded.”
Begay and Gonzales appreciate the opportunity to attend a college both affordable and near their communities in the Four Corners region. They also love the diversity and inclusion at the school, which supports multiple Native American and Indigenous student organizations, a Native American and Indigenous studies program, academic support for Native students, and a cultural kitchen shared by members of the Native-led Diversity Collaborative.
But the History Colorado project revealed what the women and others see as gaps in the school’s interactions with Native students. Leonetti and Gonzales say it hasn’t been forthcoming enough about the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School legacy. Begay says administrative support for Indigenous students fell short once the History Colorado report came out. And Sahalee Martin, who is Hopi and Chicana from northeastern Arizona, says the school needs to allocate more funding to its Native American population for things like Indigenous counselors its Native American Center, which “isn’t adequate for the amount of Indigenous students we have,” and “to make sure Indigenous students get what they need to succeed in higher education, because reconciliation is part of their mission statement and they should follow through on that.”
Heather Shotton, a Kiowa and Cheyenne descendent, citizen of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes and the school’s vice president of diversity affairs, said Fort Lewis since 2019 has been doing “intentional work” around what it means to be a Native American-serving institution — before and after the History Colorado report came out — “with an emphasis on serving.” She said “part of that is telling our story” and “thinking about how we’re centering Indigenous culture and knowledge in the curriculum and the programming.”
But these students say the administration could have done a better job of “centering” them after the report’s release, given the gravity of the information they had just received. Martin says students deserve more in general, “especially at Fort Lewis, which has such a dark history of assimilation of our people.” The school is working to heighten its profile as a Native American-serving institution and create more support for Indigenous students even as they and their Indigenous faculty continue to grapple with a history that for decades was largely hidden and push to understand how that history informs them and the college.
Recognizing a doctored history
For a year starting July 1, 2022, a team of researchers led by History Colorado’s state archeologist Holly Norton spent hundreds of hours examining thousands of archived documents trying to learn what became of children who attended Native American boarding schools across Colorado and to identify those who attended the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School.
Nine federally funded schools in Colorado at the turn of the 20th Century, along with others throughout the U.S., existed to strip Native children of their language, culture and customs “with the intent to destroy Native Americans as a legal identity — and thus incorporating them, and their resources, into American culture,” says the History Colorado report. Or, to use a phrase coined during the National Conference of Charities and Correction in Denver in 1892 by Captain Richard Henry Pratt, who founded the notoriously punishing Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, the intent was to “kill the Indian” and “save the man.”
At Fort Lewis, the methods for attempting to assimilate Native children were severe. Their hair was cut, their traditional clothes taken and their names changed, the report released Oct. 3, 2023, found.
 |
| Students at the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School (Center of Southwest Studies of Fort Lewis College) |
Under Thomas Breen, the Fort Lewis boarding school superintendent from 1894 to 1903, the school maintained a kindergarten class for children as young as 6 despite guidance from Washington that this was too young for children to be separated from their families.
Dangerous living conditions resulted in deadly illnesses like pneumonia and tuberculosis. Physical abuse was rampant, like that inflicted on two young boys forced to sleep in a coal shed on cold winter nights. In 1903, investigative reporter Polly Pry (real name Leonel Ross Campbell) broke a story about Breen sexually abusing and impregnating Native American girls as young as 14. Academic failures kept Native youth from competing with other American children. And while it was standard practice for sick children to be returned home, this was not always possible, and deaths occurred at Fort Lewis and Grand Junction Indian Boarding Schools, the History Colorado report says.
At Fort Lewis College in Durango, around 30% of students are Native American or Alaska Native. They come from more than 110 tribes and villages and receive free tuition based on a mandate created when the federal boarding school was transferred to the state with the agreement that it would become an educational institute that wouldn’t charge tuition for Native American students. Today, the school website says, “the college awards more degrees to Native American students than any other four-year, baccalaureate-granting institution in the nation — about 26% of all degrees awarded.”
Begay and Gonzales appreciate the opportunity to attend a college both affordable and near their communities in the Four Corners region. They also love the diversity and inclusion at the school, which supports multiple Native American and Indigenous student organizations, a Native American and Indigenous studies program, academic support for Native students, and a cultural kitchen shared by members of the Native-led Diversity Collaborative.
But the History Colorado project revealed what the women and others see as gaps in the school’s interactions with Native students. Leonetti and Gonzales say it hasn’t been forthcoming enough about the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School legacy. Begay says administrative support for Indigenous students fell short once the History Colorado report came out. And Sahalee Martin, who is Hopi and Chicana from northeastern Arizona, says the school needs to allocate more funding to its Native American population for things like Indigenous counselors its Native American Center, which “isn’t adequate for the amount of Indigenous students we have,” and “to make sure Indigenous students get what they need to succeed in higher education, because reconciliation is part of their mission statement and they should follow through on that.”
Heather Shotton, a Kiowa and Cheyenne descendent, citizen of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes and the school’s vice president of diversity affairs, said Fort Lewis since 2019 has been doing “intentional work” around what it means to be a Native American-serving institution — before and after the History Colorado report came out — “with an emphasis on serving.” She said “part of that is telling our story” and “thinking about how we’re centering Indigenous culture and knowledge in the curriculum and the programming.”
But these students say the administration could have done a better job of “centering” them after the report’s release, given the gravity of the information they had just received. Martin says students deserve more in general, “especially at Fort Lewis, which has such a dark history of assimilation of our people.” The school is working to heighten its profile as a Native American-serving institution and create more support for Indigenous students even as they and their Indigenous faculty continue to grapple with a history that for decades was largely hidden and push to understand how that history informs them and the college.
Recognizing a doctored history
Another entry point for this story is the day in 2019 when Joslynn Lee, a Fort Lewis chemistry professor who is enrolled Pueblo Laguna and also of Acoma Laguna and Diné affiliation, bicycled past a panel beaming out from the clock tower in the middle of campus.
The panel showed photographs from the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School in which the students were depicted as being in good hands. Under a headline that read “Walking a New Road” the text described the school as “receiving high praise for its ‘extremely good literary instruction’ and ‘excellent work’ in all industrial departments.” It showed a boy’s baseball team, which did exist, and students in a classroom with their hands in their laps. “The children are all ‘well-clothed and happy,’” the panel read. A practical education was stressed.
Lee remembered seeing the same panels when she was a Fort Lewis student in 2002. She knew a different story, one in which forced assimilation, abuse and physical struggle were the norm. So she approached Fort Lewis College president Tom Stritikus to discuss removing the panels.
Their discussion turned into a year of talks with a “thoughtful community collective,” of Indigenous faculty, staff and student representatives, Lee said. It culminated with a public healing ceremony and removal of the panels in front of hundreds in September 2021.
Shotton said the panel removal kicked off a major effort “to reconcile the dark history of FLC” and emphasize opportunities to educate people “about the atrocities and continued impact of the boarding school era.”
But Leonetti and Gonzales, who enrolled at Fort Lewis after the panel removal, say the school could be doing a better job at relaying the history of the institution to prospective and new students.
Leonetti says she did not know when she enrolled that Fort Lewis is linked to the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School, or that historical reports indicate Native students died while in attendance and some of their remains are likely still on the original “Old Fort” campus where some classes are held. Ground-penetrating radar was used to examine the cemetery site and identified 46 graves believed to be children, more than the 31 children History Colorado’s archival research found who did not return home from Fort Lewis and are likely buried there.
Old Fort is 20 minutes from Durango in Hesperus. The 6,000 acres it sits on is owned by Colorado State Land Board and managed by Fort Lewis. A highly regarded farmer-in-training program operates there, and students from other school disciplines are often invited to visit.
Begay said as a Diné tribal member, she “traditionally isn’t allowed” to visit sites where her ancestors are buried. But during her first year, she went on a tour of the Old Fort without being told about the boarding school trauma. She says she went into one of the buildings and saw photos of the students and “was very emotional and I was, like, I don’t know why I’m so emotional. Then my first year was the worst year I’ve ever had because I was mentally, physically and emotionally not doing really well.
“So obviously I had to do a ceremony,” she said, referring to the traditional Diné healing ceremony for individuals suffering from emotional distress. During her ceremony, healers “told me where I went — I wasn’t supposed to go there.” (Other Native students, including Diné, have reported having positive experiences learning farming techniques at the 6,000-acre property.)
Leonetti said she had no idea about the boarding school when she arrived from Alaska last fall and was stunned when an email from school leadership circulated that informed her, “Oh, by the way, Oct. 3, this report is gonna come out. I really, honestly didn’t know about it at all, especially being from so far away. Like, I wasn’t in the region to know that that had happened.”
Though three generations of her family attended Fort Lewis, Gonzales added that she was only “slightly aware” of the boarding school history and has been struggling with the History Colorado discoveries since they were released a few months into her freshman year.
Making Fort Lewis more inclusive
When Stritikus came on as Fort Lewis’ president in 2018, he entered a college trying to understand its history.
The school had a troubled past when it came to its dealings with minorities. From 1962 to 1994, for instance, its mascot was the Raider, a cavalry soldier wielding a flag and riding a horse into what one assumes is battle (notably, cavalry soldiers killed 160 Cheyenne and Arapaho at the Sand Creek Massacre in 1862).
The mascot then became the Skyhawk, a concept combining the hawk, a raptor known for its soaring flight and sharp vision, and sky, a nod to the 247-acre campus’ 6,872-foot-high perch on a bluff above the town of Durango.
Spurred on by Lee and building on work Indigenous faculty and staff had been doing, Stritikus decided to dig into the college’s troubled past and create a new vision for Fort Lewis.
It started in 2019 with the establishment of the Committee on FLC History and a multi-year conversation about the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School and its historical impact on Indigenous students and communities. Fort Lewis also consulted with multiple tribes in the rewording of its land acknowledgement recognizing them as the original stewards of the boarding school and college lands “to give it a living perspective,” Lee said. The school’s board of trustees created a “resolution on commitment to reconciliation” that “supports and endorses a comprehensive approach focused on healing, maintaining respectful and reciprocal relationships with Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities, and caring for Indigenous students at Fort Lewis College.”
A tribal advisory council now provides opportunities to students from tribal nations and communities, explores opportunities to collaborate and partner with them, and keeps them up-to-date on the school’s reconciliation work regarding the federal boarding school history.
And there was the removal of the panels, which Lee ultimately gets credit for.
During this period “was the discovery of the mass graves in Canada,” Stritikus said. “That’s what set us on the course to really involve tribal nations more directly. To say, ‘Hey, this is not just Fort Lewis. You need to make this decision with us.’” This is why they backed House Bill 1327, which was signed by Polis at Fort Lewis, he said.
But none of these significant steps toward reconciliation prepared students for the History Colorado report.
Students, the report and Fort Lewis’ support
Begay remembers a heaviness enveloping the campus once the report came out. Students were invited to meet in the Native American Center with Shotton, Stritikus and faculty from in the Center for Indigenous Research, Culture and Language space. Faculty from the sociology department and representatives from the Sexual Assault Services Organization also came. The group went through the report in detail. It took four hours.
“It was very hard reading the report, knowing my people were the highest number to go to the boarding school,” Begay said. Navajo students outnumbered others by more than three times at the school. “That was the hardest thing because I didn’t think it was that many. It was also a very emotional day across the school and we were crying together.”
Begay texted her mother and then called her. “And I started crying because I was like, this is what they did to our relatives, Mom. This is what they done to us. And the first person I thought of was my grandma, who went to boarding school but she barely talks about it. She told me a few things that they did do to her but it wasn’t as harsh as what she was seeing her classmates getting. But I tend to see with my grandma how it definitely impacted her.”
“But I feel like the faculty were like, ‘Oh, this happened, but you guys have schoolwork,’” she continued. “And we were like, ‘We understand, we understand that.’
“But they also needed to understand that our people never came back and we are intertwined together,” she added. “Knowing we were experiencing that and knowing some professors were, like, ‘You still have a paper to do, you still have an exam to do.’ No, they did not get it.”
Leonetti said the day after the report came out, none of her teachers talked about it in class. “None of them even acknowledged it. I didn’t go to classes all day the day it was released, and I had one professor mark me as absent — even though there was a facultywide email sent out telling faculty to give students leniency. So I had to go talk to that professor and explain like, ‘Hey, I was kind of going through it that day. You’re supposed to excuse me.’”
And Gonzales said while the Native American Indigenous Studies and psychology departments gave her leniency that week, by the following week “it just, they just stopped talking about it. And then, I like to nag people a lot. I like to be very upfront. So every now and then, if we’re talking about a topic, I’ll be, like, ‘Oh, remember the boarding school? Remember when the report came out?’”
Fort Lewis College’s student-run magazine, The Independent, reported that two days after the report was released, administration established a “resilience room” where the school community could “reflect, relax and heal.” Free therapy sessions were offered through the counseling center. And in late October, Jennie Sturm, a geophysical archaeologist History Colorado hired to search the boarding school grounds for graves using ground-penetrating radar, came to Fort Lewis and held a listening session with students to go over her findings.
COVID kept Norton, from History Colorado, from attending but she said there was good turnout and the students were “very engaged.” School administrators “and Dr. Shotton, in particular” were “really concerned about the students and how they were experiencing this and what their perceptions and reactions were and to how best to care for them.”
Begay, Leonetti and Gonzales agree that Stritikus and the Indigenous faculty and staff have been available and supportive throughout the reconciliation process.
“When the president decided, when we all decided, to take the panels down, I remember a lot of my friends that are Native were, like, ‘Oh, that’s a win for us knowing that we’re slowly getting ourselves back, that Fort Lewis is finally listening to us,’” Begay said.
And with the boarding school report, Leonetti said, “I feel like Tom did a really good job. I talked to him the week that happened and he was very supportive.”
When Stritikus heard this feedback during an interview with The Colorado Sun on March 29, he seemed delighted.
“When we started this work, when I came on the campus, what I felt was that for as Indigenous as we were, in a school that had been doing Native American waivers since the beginning of time, the Native American students were not visible in the way that they should be. Thinking way back, this has always been about building an inclusive community for students, and a place where students could show up as their whole selves.”
“So the fact that students met with you and said they both appreciated what the president did but had critiques for the president, that’s awesome,” he added. “Because to me, that says no matter what, at the end of the day, we’ve created a culture where students get to share what they think, show up as who they are and voice their opinions. I’m elated that students are sharing their thoughts with people, as we’ve tried to create that culture from the beginning.”
And as for the school’s response to students in the aftermath of the release, Stritikus said, “our team, certainly on the week the report came out and the week after, did an incredible job of supporting students. So students who feel like, ‘wait a minute. We put this report on the shelf. What’s happening here?’ That’s a fair point we should listen to, but what I also always try to talk about is this is less about history. We’re not a museum. We’re not a historical society. We’re an educational institution.
“So the momentum that should be created from the report is that responsibility Dr. Shotton has so clearly laid out,” he added. “Fort Lewis has an obligation to build in the students those things that the boarding school took away — language, wellness, leadership and Indigenous ways of knowing.”
The mission will have to carry on without Stritikus. He has been hired as president of Occidental College in Los Angeles. His last act at Fort Lewis was presiding over graduation Saturday.
Lee said, “We’re still working through reconciliation as an institution and will even after Tom leaves. It’s in our board of trustees resolution and they are committed to supporting our Indigenous students even as anti-DEI measures are happening in other states.”
Moving through generational trauma into a brighter future
The History Colorado report says collectively, the “suite of negative impacts” inflicted on Native Americans through the federal government’s assimilation process “is often referred to as intergenerational trauma. This is a widely accepted concept that trauma experienced by an individual can be passed down to subsequent generations, psychologically, emotionally and even physically.”
Fort Lewis student Shenay Atene, who is Diné from Monument Valley, Utah, and a psychology major who graduated Saturday, said this trauma is sometimes expressed in drug and alcohol abuse among some Native Americans “and it can lead to everything else, and they can even pass away from it.”
One way Fort Lewis Indigenous students have coped through the reconciliation process is by creating art about their history and experiences.
Atene participated in an exhibit through the Center of Southwest Studies called As Seeds We Grow: Student Reflections on Resilience, which explored student identity and cultural resilience with consideration to the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School history.
The United States has 183 Bureau of Indian Education-funded elementary and secondary schools and residential facilities, of which 55 are bureau-operated and 128 are tribally controlled. They are nothing like the boarding schools of the past.
Atene has a complicated relationship with boarding schools. From first through eighth grade, she attended Kayenta Community School in Kayenta, Arizona. She didn’t want to go; her father made her. He said he wanted her to be independent, but the experience was difficult.
Not in the way the original Native American boarding schools were in Colorado — not even close to that, she said. But as a little girl, she went to bed at night fearing someone would hurt her or steal her. Shenay’s grandparents attended the kind of boarding schools where students were punished for speaking their language. Speaking Navajo was discouraged when her dad, now in his 50s, attended.
Learning details about the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School and relating them to the fact that her parents sent her to a boarding school evoked emotional trauma that Atene needed therapy to process. “I didn’t necessarily need to work through it,” she said, “but to realize what I went through was hard.”
One way she healed at Fort Lewis was through facilitating a traditional sheep butchering on the Old Fort grounds. When reports of Indigenous child abuse started surfacing in Canada, she said, the kill became “much more meaningful.”
“The way the Navajo people heal is through community and that’s through food,” she said. “What better way to process the boarding school information than through traditional foods? Slaughtering a sheep on the old boarding school grounds meant so much more because they couldn’t have that. We really are our ancestors’ wildest dreams.”
In the As Seeds We Grow exhibit, she contributed the traditional Native American jingle dress she wore throughout her childhood, which went with her “from different states to different schools.”
She wore the necklace and belt she danced in starting at age 5. They among the few remaining items she has from her grandmother.
Three paintings she made recall her years in boarding school. The most powerful is called “The Nights,” about which she wrote, “There were always girls that cried through the night, but we never spoke about it with each other. It wasn’t until after a few months of being in Peewee Hall that I accepted that this was my life. This was our life.”
In March, she described the work she did for the exhibit as “healing.” But, she added, at home, where her pieces are now safely stowed, she keeps “The Nights,” which has dark swirls coming out of a door with a window through which she imagined she was being watched, covered with a sheet.
There is still healing to be done. And History Colorado has yet to fulfill its entire mission mandated by House Bill 1327. It is ordered to collect oral histories to help deepen what’s known about the boarding school experience. But Norton doesn’t know if the oral histories are needed.
In the report, she asks the state to “identify the purposes” of them, saying, “It cannot be simply a performative action.”
“Many people note that their parents and grandparents did not speak at great length about their experiences,” she said, cautioning, “oral histories must serve a greater purpose than simply recording the trauma of already victimized people, who do not owe the state their emotions or stories.”
New legislation currently under consideration requests an additional $1 million for History Colorado to continue its research through 2027.
Meanwhile, Atene graduated Saturday and now is off on a journey to become an Indigenous geriatric psychologist, a career she’s inventing to help the elders in her community. She said her experience at Fort Lewis was “amazing because of all the supportive staff and faculty. They helped me learn how to become a leader, embrace my past, and make it a useful tool when helping others.”
When she thought about the momentous occasion, she was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “We’re Native in a Western educational institution. Who would have thought 200 years ago this would have happened? We’re our ancestors’ prayers coming through.”
May 7, 2024
Jul 13, 2023
Fuckery With Purpose
There's no mystery about the student loan problem - or with Biden's difficulty in helping to get people out from under an unfair debt burden.
- Erosion of Real Wealth
- The near elimination of Labor's participation in Productivity Gains over the last 25 years
- Predatory lending practices
- GOP running interference for the lenders
In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, the federal government stopped requiring regular payments of student loan debt — a pause that has lasted more than three years. But student loan repayment had been dwindling for at least a decade before the pause.
You can imagine the stock of outstanding student debt as an overflowing bathtub: More students purchasing more undergraduate and advanced degrees at increasing tuition prices is the water gushing out of the faucet, and non-repayment is a blockage in the drain. The drain is blocked because despite what economists, policy-makers and educational administrators claim, a college degree doesn’t always “pay off.”
In recent years, many Americans with student loans weren’t making enough money to pay even the accumulating interest on their debt, let alone make progress on the principal. Wage stagnation is a long-running phenomenon that worsened after the Great Recession. But an important additional source of student loan misery is the widening and diversifying nature of the Americans who take them out. It’s increasingly the case that people who were always going to have low earnings no matter their educational attainment are also overloaded with student debt — think of underpaid teachers who acquired expensive master’s degrees for only a modest pay increase. The promise of higher education leading directly to high incomes is hollow.
Regardless of what happens after the scheduled resumption of payments in September and to the Biden administration’s plans for partial student debt forgiveness following the Supreme Court’s ruling in June, we predict that most of the outstanding balances — not to mention the roughly $100 billion in new loans issued every year — won’t ever be repaid. In the meantime, while the administration and the courts wrangle over the executive branch’s ability to waive student debt under existing law, student debtors feel forced to downsize their life plans. They delay or forgo marriage and family formation, homeownership, retirement and their children’s education: a profound failure of social reproduction.
Our student debt research uses credit reports, both from an annual, representative cross-section of student borrowers and from a single group of borrowers we’ve been following since 2009. We found that counterintuitively, the repayment pause was the best thing that ever happened to help student loans get repaid. That’s because in normal times, student debt balances mostly increase, thanks to monthly interest payments many borrowers are unable to keep up with. In 2020, 60.7 percent of outstanding student loans had a higher balance than when they were first issued. By 2022, that number had declined to 53.7 percent because interest was waived during the pandemic and some borrowers continued to pay down their principal.
The chart below compares repayment progress on loans in our 2020 cross-section with progress in 2022. The group with increasing balances shrank enormously during the repayment pause. Notably, Black and Latino borrowers had more loans with increasing balances before the pause; they benefit disproportionately while it remains in effect.
Student borrowers are not a monolithic group, and some demographic groups fare far better with their education debt than others. From the group of 2009-era debtors we’ve been following, we learned that female, Black and Latino borrowers generally saw their loan balances continue to increase above their 2009 level; male, white and Asian borrowers generally were able to make progress in paying their balances down (albeit not to zero — and the standard repayment term on federal loans is 10 years).
The diverging trajectories of Americans with student loans
On average, male, white and Asian borrowers made progress on their loans between 2009 and 2022. Female, Black and Latino borrowers had increasing balances until the repayment pause came into effect.
These divergent trajectories are due to structural inequalities in the labor market, which disadvantaged workers try to overcome with increased educational attainment. More advantaged workers don’t need to borrow as much to earn a decent salary and can start paying off the debt they do take on more quickly. The pandemic repayment pause changed the game, causing balances that had been increasing over the prior decade to start to fall. A student loan system in which borrowers do not generally repay their student loans during normal times, but in which they do repay them when they’re not required to, cannot be said to be functioning well.
This situation is the fruit of a tacit agreement among state legislatures, college administrators and the federal government dating back to the 1970s: defund public colleges and universities and shift them to a tuition-based revenue model, with the federal government backstopping the system with student debt so that more students can continue to obtain more expensive education. This change was justified by the idea that higher education “pays off” in the labor market.
Opportunities for middle-class employment without a college degree have certainly dwindled. But increasing the educational credentials required for any given job or salary doesn’t magically make pay go up. It just means the higher education system gets to take a larger slice of a worker’s lifetime earnings on the front end. And if the debt can’t be repaid, taxpayers swallow the loss on the back end — but only after the borrower has endured years of mounting balances and their negative consequences for wealth accumulation and creditworthiness.
This odd structure — in which federal funding comes in the form of student loans that won’t ever be repaid, as opposed to direct funding of colleges and universities — lets school administrators off the regulatory hook. In theory, the market of students selecting their preferred college experience is supposed to discipline schools’ financial conduct. In reality, it does not. This is why college administrators resist free-college proposals that amount to direct federal funding in return for capping tuition: They fear their socioeconomically segregated business models wouldn’t survive the regulatory scrutiny attached to those dollars.
The $1.7 trillion tower of mostly unrepayable student debt is a symbol of education policy failure. Unfortunately, politicians in both parties seem unable to think outside the neoliberal box that got us here. Republicans in Congress have proposed limits to federal loans, barring students from the system once their balances reach a certain threshold. That is an exclusionary vision that seeks to return higher education to its pre-G.I. Bill status as a bastion of white privilege for a tiny elite.
You can imagine the stock of outstanding student debt as an overflowing bathtub: More students purchasing more undergraduate and advanced degrees at increasing tuition prices is the water gushing out of the faucet, and non-repayment is a blockage in the drain. The drain is blocked because despite what economists, policy-makers and educational administrators claim, a college degree doesn’t always “pay off.”
In recent years, many Americans with student loans weren’t making enough money to pay even the accumulating interest on their debt, let alone make progress on the principal. Wage stagnation is a long-running phenomenon that worsened after the Great Recession. But an important additional source of student loan misery is the widening and diversifying nature of the Americans who take them out. It’s increasingly the case that people who were always going to have low earnings no matter their educational attainment are also overloaded with student debt — think of underpaid teachers who acquired expensive master’s degrees for only a modest pay increase. The promise of higher education leading directly to high incomes is hollow.
Regardless of what happens after the scheduled resumption of payments in September and to the Biden administration’s plans for partial student debt forgiveness following the Supreme Court’s ruling in June, we predict that most of the outstanding balances — not to mention the roughly $100 billion in new loans issued every year — won’t ever be repaid. In the meantime, while the administration and the courts wrangle over the executive branch’s ability to waive student debt under existing law, student debtors feel forced to downsize their life plans. They delay or forgo marriage and family formation, homeownership, retirement and their children’s education: a profound failure of social reproduction.
Our student debt research uses credit reports, both from an annual, representative cross-section of student borrowers and from a single group of borrowers we’ve been following since 2009. We found that counterintuitively, the repayment pause was the best thing that ever happened to help student loans get repaid. That’s because in normal times, student debt balances mostly increase, thanks to monthly interest payments many borrowers are unable to keep up with. In 2020, 60.7 percent of outstanding student loans had a higher balance than when they were first issued. By 2022, that number had declined to 53.7 percent because interest was waived during the pandemic and some borrowers continued to pay down their principal.
The chart below compares repayment progress on loans in our 2020 cross-section with progress in 2022. The group with increasing balances shrank enormously during the repayment pause. Notably, Black and Latino borrowers had more loans with increasing balances before the pause; they benefit disproportionately while it remains in effect.
Student borrowers are not a monolithic group, and some demographic groups fare far better with their education debt than others. From the group of 2009-era debtors we’ve been following, we learned that female, Black and Latino borrowers generally saw their loan balances continue to increase above their 2009 level; male, white and Asian borrowers generally were able to make progress in paying their balances down (albeit not to zero — and the standard repayment term on federal loans is 10 years).
The diverging trajectories of Americans with student loans
On average, male, white and Asian borrowers made progress on their loans between 2009 and 2022. Female, Black and Latino borrowers had increasing balances until the repayment pause came into effect.
These divergent trajectories are due to structural inequalities in the labor market, which disadvantaged workers try to overcome with increased educational attainment. More advantaged workers don’t need to borrow as much to earn a decent salary and can start paying off the debt they do take on more quickly. The pandemic repayment pause changed the game, causing balances that had been increasing over the prior decade to start to fall. A student loan system in which borrowers do not generally repay their student loans during normal times, but in which they do repay them when they’re not required to, cannot be said to be functioning well.
This situation is the fruit of a tacit agreement among state legislatures, college administrators and the federal government dating back to the 1970s: defund public colleges and universities and shift them to a tuition-based revenue model, with the federal government backstopping the system with student debt so that more students can continue to obtain more expensive education. This change was justified by the idea that higher education “pays off” in the labor market.
Opportunities for middle-class employment without a college degree have certainly dwindled. But increasing the educational credentials required for any given job or salary doesn’t magically make pay go up. It just means the higher education system gets to take a larger slice of a worker’s lifetime earnings on the front end. And if the debt can’t be repaid, taxpayers swallow the loss on the back end — but only after the borrower has endured years of mounting balances and their negative consequences for wealth accumulation and creditworthiness.
This odd structure — in which federal funding comes in the form of student loans that won’t ever be repaid, as opposed to direct funding of colleges and universities — lets school administrators off the regulatory hook. In theory, the market of students selecting their preferred college experience is supposed to discipline schools’ financial conduct. In reality, it does not. This is why college administrators resist free-college proposals that amount to direct federal funding in return for capping tuition: They fear their socioeconomically segregated business models wouldn’t survive the regulatory scrutiny attached to those dollars.
The $1.7 trillion tower of mostly unrepayable student debt is a symbol of education policy failure. Unfortunately, politicians in both parties seem unable to think outside the neoliberal box that got us here. Republicans in Congress have proposed limits to federal loans, barring students from the system once their balances reach a certain threshold. That is an exclusionary vision that seeks to return higher education to its pre-G.I. Bill status as a bastion of white privilege for a tiny elite.
And there's that razor blade.
The Biden administration proposes to regulate (some) colleges based on whether their students can eventually repay their student loans and to force all programs to disclose post-graduation earnings and debt burden before students enroll. Those proposals cling to the idea that the labor market is where the value of an education is ultimately determined. Colleges can convincingly object that they don’t control their students’ lives after graduation and would be penalized for enrolling needier students.
So, NYT, Biden shouldn't go for a little tempering regulation because the people who're acting all shitty now would act shitty?
To get a handle on the student debt crisis, the government will eventually have to redesign its relationship with American higher education. The current era of tuition-based revenue models has colleges competing for the students who can pay full freight, which can relegate the neediest students to the least-resourced institutions. A healthier system would look more homogenous, with students from all over the income scale spread across institutions nationwide, instead of being an elite scramble between students and schools to fill a few open seats at the top.
IDK what the fuck you're talking about, NYT. And I have no idea why you seem to think the Republicans are suddenly going to reverse themselves and get all cuddly with a Dept Of Education that they've been actively and publicly trying to kill for 25 years.
What political system are you even watching?
To get there, the Department of Education should make institution-level eligibility for federal student loans contingent on a uniform, very low cost of attendance for undergraduates and affordable tuition levels for professional programs. The structure of federal student loans should reflect society’s long-term needs, not just those of employers and universities preying on the generosity of the student loan program and of students desperate for jobs in an economy that feels ever more winner-take-all.
One way of ensuring and backstopping those policy goals could be the creation of a new federal university system, in which the campuses would be homogeneous in terms of financial and other resources and the student bodies socioeconomically diverse, rather than the other way around. But it’s more comfortable and politically convenient to continue to fight the culture war over higher education than to confront the facts about the causes and consequences of this ugly mountain of student debt. The Supreme Court has ruled. The Biden administration is searching for a new way forward. It’s time for a change of course.
Mar 4, 2023
These Fucking Fucks
‘All I can say is I’m sorry,’ Bert Ellis told colleagues on the University of Virginia’s governing board
And all I can say, Mr Ellis, is fuck you and fuck all these fucking fucks who get appointed by these fucking Republican Governors, with obvious intent to fuck up Mr Jefferson's vision of an academical village.
The University of Virginia board member who disparaged administrators and certain student groups in text messages to colleagues that recently came to light apologized Friday at a board meeting in Charlottesville.
Bert Ellis, who joined U-Va.’s governing Board of Visitors last year, sent a series of combative texts during the summer to allies and three other board members who, like him, were appointed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R). Redacted versions of the texts were obtained last month by a Richmond-based author, Jeff Thomas, under the state Freedom of Information Act. The Washington Post disclosed the text conversations in a Feb. 23 article.
In one text, Ellis pointed out the webpage of a vice provost and wrote: “Check out this numnut who works for [U-Va. Provost Ian] Baucom and has nothing to do but highlight slavery at UVA.” In others, he referred to unnamed people who work for U-Va. President James E. Ryan as “schmucks” and referred to members of the Student Council and the Cavalier Daily student newspaper as “these numnuts.”
Those and other texts drawn from Ellis’s cellphone shook the 26,000-student university and its community of faculty, staff and alumni.
On Friday, Ellis appeared contrite as he spoke to the board in a meeting shown via a live stream.
“As the elephant in the room, may I once again to all of my colleagues offer my apology,” Ellis said. “You know, those were private and confidential messages that were still out of place. I am emotional, and I have occasion to do things that I would never expect to be on the front page of The Washington Post. I have learned my lesson about FOIA, but I can’t put the genie back in the bottle. So all I can say is I’m sorry.”
Ellis, who holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from U-Va., is an entrepreneur and investor who runs a business based in Atlanta. He co-founded and leads a group of U-Va. alumni and others known as the Jefferson Council, which opposes limits on free speech and seeks to protect the legacy of Thomas Jefferson at the public university he founded in 1819.
The U-Va. board has 19 members who serve staggered terms. As of now, the majority were appointed by Youngkin’s Democratic predecessors. Among them is Whittington W. Clement, who holds the title of rector and leads the board. Ellis also criticized Clement in one of the texts, calling a letter the rector wrote to former board members “a damn whitewash.”
As he opened the meeting, Clement noted that he had read The Post article about Ellis’s texts.
“The rhetoric of those messages, particularly ones that disparage students, faculty and staff, really run contrary to the values that Thomas Jefferson sought to instill in this community and which we as members of the university’s governing board, in turn, try to impart on our students,” Clement said. He also praised the “professionalism” of the U-Va. finance department, which was the subject of a text exchange Ellis had with a senior university official.
Another board member, Thomas A. DePasquale, who was first appointed by Gov. Terry McAuliffe in 2016, urged colleagues to avoid “Monday morning quarterbacking” of the U-Va. administration. “It’s just destructive,” he said.
After DePasquale finished, Clement sought to move past the awkward moment. “So let’s get on with our agenda,” the rector said.
Jan 28, 2023
Plutocracy Rising
How it started
How it's going
Creation of a permanent underclass is both indicative of (and mission-critical for) a fledgling plutocracy.
As more and more power and money are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, more and more people have less and less.
Duh.
At some point, as the ever burgeoning lower class begins to realize they have practically nothing left to lose, a charismatic leader will emerge - always presenting as "one of you".
Duh again.
The leader will form a core group of devotees who pretend to represent the majority, and push for restoration of a once glorious and virtuous nation - and blah blah blah.
Old Saying: The man on the white horse always promises peace and freedom and prosperity - but always delivers nothing but further immiseration.
Hopefully, regular visitors dropping in to check on my daily madness will recognize all of that as one big DUH.
Anyway, here's a bigly important cog in that plutocratic machinery.
In one of the richest nations on earth, the path to prosperity has narrowed significantly in recent decades — especially for those without a college education. More than 62 percent of Americans ages 25 and up do not hold bachelor’s degrees, and the earnings gap between those with a college education and those without one has never been wider. In 2021, the difference between the median earnings of younger workers with bachelor’s degrees and workers of the same age with high-school diplomas only was $22,000 — the largest since the Federal Reserve Bank of New York began tracking earnings in 1990. That’s happening even as the cost of college spirals upward, putting it out of reach for many. This has fueled anxiety, bitterness and a sense of alienation among the millions who see themselves as shut out of an economy that does not value them.
Making college more affordable is important, but there are other keys to the doors of opportunity as well. With an executive order issued on Jan. 18, his first full day as governor, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania used one of them: He eliminated the requirement of a four-year college degree for the vast majority of jobs in the state government, a change similar to one that Maryland and Utah made last year. This demonstrates both good policy and good leadership, representing a concrete change in hiring philosophy that stops reducing people to a credential and conveys that everyone — college-educated or not — has experience and worth that employers should consider. It is a step — and a mind-set — that other leaders should consider as well.
The decision was driven in part by the realities of a tight labor market. Unemployment in Pennsylvania is 3.9 percent — close to the national average of 3.5 percent — and lower than it was before the pandemic. Public and private employers have been struggling to find qualified applicants, prompting a re-evaluation of hiring criteria. As Mr. Shapiro’s order notes, “In the modern labor market, applicants gain knowledge, skills and abilities through a variety of means, including apprenticeships, on-the-job training, military training and trade schools.”
His move opens up 92 percent of state government jobs — approximately 65,000 positions — to anyone with “the relevant work experience and skills-based training, regardless of their educational attainment.” Job postings will emphasize experience over education.
The nonprofit organization Opportunity@Work has been promoting the idea of skills- and experience-based hiring since 2015. It estimates that 50 percent of the American work force comprises workers who have gained their skills through alternative routes such as apprenticeships, military service, trade schools, certificate programs and on-the-job training rather than acquiring bachelor’s degrees — a deep pool of underutilized and undercompensated talent. If employers don’t have a strategy for engaging this pool, said Byron Auguste, the group’s chief executive and co-founder, “they don’t have a talent strategy — they only have half a talent strategy.”
If the United States can’t find ways to tap into all of this talent, we will not be able to solve our most urgent problems, like climate change and pandemic preparedness, or build a stronger and fairer country. Too many Americans see our society and economy as profoundly unfair, set up to serve the needs of well-connected elites and providing more benefits to people who went to college or know how to work the system. And too many feel that political leaders don’t care about them and that government and institutions don’t work for them. Opening up jobs may seem small-bore, but it shows that government is listening and helps build trust among those who may feel unseen or looked down upon by parts of the labor market.
The private sector has been moving gradually in this direction already. Major players to embrace skill-based hiring include General Motors, Bank of America, Google, Apple and Accenture. IBM is recognized as a particular leader; about half of its U.S. job openings no longer require a four-year degree.
This trend has been concentrated among what is termed “middle-skill jobs,” which call for some education or training beyond high school, according to a 2022 report by researchers from Harvard Business School and Emsi Burning Glass, a labor market data firm. These middle-skill jobs, the report notes, “have long served as an important steppingstone to the middle class.”
During the Great Recession, many of those steppingstones were removed. Unemployment was high, and many employers responded with “degree inflation” — larding college education requirements onto jobs that previously had not called for them — even though the work involved remained the same. As a result, the report notes, “key avenues for upward mobility were closed to roughly 80 million prime working age Americans at a time when income inequality was already widening.”
Over the last few years, this degree inflation has begun to recede. If this “degree reset” continues, an additional 1.4 million jobs would be opened to workers without college degrees over the next five years.
This could also help make the American work force more diverse and inclusive in several ways. Black and Hispanic job-seekers are less likely to have bachelor’s degrees than non-Hispanic whites and Asian Americans. Rural Americans would also benefit; only 25 percent of them hold a bachelor’s degree or higher. “No part of the country is more disadvantaged by degree screening than rural America,” Mr. Auguste said.
The public sector should join this reset more aggressively. In June 2020, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to make skills more important than degrees in federal hiring. The Biden administration has also taken a couple of steps in that direction.
Getting more states on board could provide a valuable boost; state governments are among the largest employers in many states, so their hiring criteria play a special role in validating workers without college degrees. Last March, Larry Hogan of Maryland became the first governor to announce that his state was doing away with college degree requirements for many jobs. In December, his fellow Republican, Spencer Cox of Utah, followed suit. “Degrees have become a blanketed barrier to entry in too many jobs,” Mr. Cox said. “Instead of focusing on demonstrated competence, the focus too often has been on a piece of paper.”
With Mr. Shapiro, a Democrat, weighing in for Pennsylvania, the nation’s fifth most populous state, the movement’s bipartisan credentials have been burnished. It is a move that Americans in every state should actively encourage.
Expanding the terms for who can get hired is a change that would reverberate far beyond individual jobs and job seekers. It would bring a greater degree of openness and fairness into the labor market and send a message about government’s ability to adapt and respond to the concerns of its citizens. In a country where a majority of people do not have bachelor’s degrees, policies that automatically close off jobs to so many people contribute to the perception that the system is rigged against them.
A healthy democracy recognizes and promotes opportunity for everyone. Americans need to hear that message.
Aug 19, 2022
Dems Deliver
Maintaining a kind of moderation and modulation has always ended up being perceived as Wishy-Washy - like we think maybe it's OK what they're doing, but it's all a big "Meh - whatever, dude".
So when the Republicans get all assertive - even though most of what they say is a little light on fact, and often a flat-out lie - an awful lot of people fall for their bullshit because it's presented with a confident gung-ho attitude.
Sometimes I have a little trouble remembering that progressive ideas always win because progress is inevitable. Gotta keep that in mind.
Of course, the caveat is that progressive ideas win when we remember our history, and we regard it accurately. So maybe we need to be even more wary of Republican efforts to fudge that history and to actually prohibit the thorough examination necessary to interpret it correctly. But that's a whole different rant.
Anyway, I'm not going to be shy about saying I think Biden's doing what he should be doing - what I want someone to be doing.
Biden Administration has engineered $32 billion in student loan forgiveness so far.
President Biden forgives close to $4 billion in student debt — what’s next?
President Joe Biden wiped $3.9 billion from the student loan records Tuesday.
More than 200,000 former students, who still owe on a federal student loan from their time at ITT Technical Institute will see their loan balances cleared, whether they’ve applied for forgiveness or not.
ITT Educational Services closed its campuses in 2016 after years of questioning and scrutiny of its accreditation standards and recruiting processes. At the time, the institution had about 45,000 students across 130 campuses.
Some of the former students were already eligible for federal student loans forgiveness but this move applies to all borrowers who took on debt attending the school between 2005 and September 2016, when the school closed.
This brings the total amount of loan discharges under Biden to nearly $32 billion and leaves many wondering what more could be forgiven or at least if payments will remain on pause.
The pause has been helpful for millions
After mortgages, student loans make up the biggest chunk of household debt at more than $1.5 trillion, according to the Brookings Institution.
At the start of the pandemic, the government froze student loan repayments for most borrowers. In April, the White House extended the moratorium for the sixth time through to August 31.
“This pause will help 41 million people keep up with their monthly bills and meet their basic needs,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in an announcement. “It will give borrowers some urgently needed time to prepare for a return to repayment.”
A letter addressed to Biden and Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona and signed by more than 100 lawmakers highlighted those positive effects of the freeze.
“For the first time, many borrowers have had the opportunity to pay down debt, open a savings account, purchase a home, and save for retirement — none of which would have been possible without the payment pause.”
As the letter pointed out, many used the break to save up to buy homes, pay off credit cards or catch up on other bills.
“Resuming student loan payments would force millions of borrowers to choose between paying their federal student loans or putting a roof over their heads, food on the table, or paying for child care and health care,” the lawmakers wrote.
A path to forgiveness
Mark Kantrowitz, a student loans expert who’s written five books about scholarships and financial aid, says there are three potential paths to forgiveness: regulation, legislation or executive authority.
If the president were to use executive action to cancel student debt, he would face legal challenges that Kantrowitz does not expect would not go Biden’s way. And Congress has not yet passed legislation for broad loan forgiveness, nor does it seem poised to.
Regulation might be the president’s best bet, says Kantrowitz, whose books include How to Appeal for More Financial Aid.
The federal government offers four income-driven repayment plans, which set loan payments at amounts meant to be affordable to borrowers based on their incomes and family size.
Most people forget these are also loan forgiveness plans, Kantrowitz says. After making qualifying payments for 20 or 25 years, depending on the plan, borrowers can have their remaining debt eliminated. Those who work in public service may qualify for forgiveness after just 10 years of payments.
One of four plans — the Income-Contingent Repayment Plan — gives the U.S. Department of Education broad regulatory authority such that it could be remade into a means-tested loan forgiveness program, says Kantrowitz.
Means testing, a method of determining eligibility for government assistance, is a way of addressing the concern over helping people who might not need it.
Biden “doesn’t believe that — that millionaires and billionaires, obviously, should benefit or even people from the highest income,” former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said after Biden’s remarks in the spring. “So that’s certainly something he would be looking at.”
Will he or won’t he?
One likely reason that Biden hasn’t followed through on his campaign proposal is the economic and geopolitical fallout of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, says Siri Terjesen, a management professor and associate dean at Florida Atlantic University.
“With year-on-year inflation closing in on 10%, policymakers who remember basic economics will want to curb further stimulus in order to bring inflation back under control,” she said in an email. “A large student loan forgiveness program would drive up inflation even faster.”
Since the beginning of 2020, Biden has forgiven billions of dollars worth of student debt through other programs. Those include plans for borrowers who were misled by their schools, those with disabilities and others who work in public service.
The push for more continues.
The majority of Americans support student debt cancellation, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren argued in a Senate committee hearing this spring.
“There is scarcely a working person in America who does not have a friend or family member or coworkers who is weighted down by student loan debt,” said Warren, who supports forgiving $50,000 per borrower.
Canceling that amount would cost $904 billion and forgive the full balances of about 30 million — or 79% — of borrowers, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York economists.
Forgiving $10,000 per borrower would cost $321 billion and eliminate the entire balance for 11.8 million borrowers, or about 31%.
Adding an income cap to forgiveness proposals “substantially reduces the cost of student loan forgiveness and increases the share of benefit going to borrowers who are more likely to struggle repaying their debts,” the report says.
Potential problems with broad student debt forgiveness
Advocates of broad forgiveness argue that student loans contribute to racial and socioeconomic wealth gaps. But there are better ways to reduce racial wealth gaps, argues Adam Looney, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Looney posits that student loan forgiveness is regressive and only targeted debt relief policies can work to address inequities caused by federal student loan programs.
“Measured appropriately, student debt is concentrated among high-wealth households and loan forgiveness is regressive whether measured by income, educational attainment, or wealth,” he writes. “Across-the-board forgiveness is therefore a costly and ineffective way to reduce economic gaps by race or socioeconomic status.”
The next steps
Kantrowitz expects Biden to make one more extension of the payment pause and interest waiver that will last until after the upcoming midterm elections.
While the White House has kept its cards close to its chest, Kantrowitz believes that loan forgiveness is likely to happen. “And if it happens it’s likely to be limited in amount and eligibility,” he says.
Biden has already ruled out canceling $50,000 worth of debt, but $10,000 of forgiveness is still on the table.
Meanwhile, the issue continues to shine light on the rising costs of going to college.
College tuition and fees were about 170% more expensive in 2021 than in 2001, Tejersen cites in a new book on reducing higher education bureaucracy.
“The silver lining in the student debt fiasco,” she says, “is that more Americans recognize the need to identify affordable college options.”
Jun 24, 2022
Annoyance
How large are the endowments of colleges and universities in the United States?
Response:
At the end of fiscal year 2020, the market value of the endowment funds of colleges and universities was $691 billion, which was 2 percent higher than the beginning of the fiscal year, when the total was $675 billion.
The five institutions with the largest endowments at the end of fiscal year 2020 were:
The five institutions with the largest endowments at the end of fiscal year 2020 were:
- Harvard University ($42 billion)
- Yale University ($31 billion)
- The University of Texas System ($31 billion)
- Stanford University ($29 billion)
- Princeton University ($26 billion)
Obviously, most colleges and universities don't enjoy endowments in the billions of dollars, but there's a shitload that do, and while some smaller schools are going broke and closing their doors (largely the old religious schools, and some for-profit joints), almost none have been really hurting for cash, even as they cut corners and poor-mouth the shit out of it all the fucking time.
So I have to ask - Why does it cost me $100,000 to send a kid thru 4 years of college, when American schools are worth more than the GDP of 175 countries around the world?
Average Cost of College & Tuition
Report Highlights.
- The average cost of college* in the United States is $35,331 per student per year, including books, supplies, and daily living expenses
- The average cost of college has more-than doubled in the 21st century, with an annual growth rate of 6.8%.
- The average in-state student attending a public 4-year institution spends $25,487 for one academic year.
- The average cost of in-state tuition alone is $9,349; out-of-state tuition averages $27,023.
- The average traditional private university student spends a total of $53,217 per academic year, $35,807 of it on tuition and fees.
- Considering student loan interest and loss of income, the ultimate cost of a bachelor’s degree can exceed $400,000.
(*In this context, college refers to any 4-year postsecondary institution that offers an undergraduate degree program; this is the average cost to first-time, full-time undergraduates.)
Jump to a state:
AL | AK | AZ | AR | CA | CO | CT | DE | FL | GA | HI | ID | IL | IN | IA | KS | KY | LA | ME | MD | MA | MI | MN | MS | MO | MT | NE | NV | NH | NJ | NM | NY | NC | ND | OH | OK | OR | PA | RI | SC | SD | TN | TX | UT | VT | VA | WA | WV | WI | WY
Stop wondering why people are pissed off. Start voting for people who want to sort it all out and make it a little more fair before we tip completely into a system of inflexible stratification according to class - cuz we're pretty fuckin' close to that right now.
Feb 24, 2022
Today's WTF
Basically: "I don't know what Critical Race Theory is, but lemme tell you what it is."
"The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro. They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony ... unfortunately, this is a fantasy of self deception and comfortable vanity." --MLK
Jan 23, 2022
Today's Beau
Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column
"Where knowledge is a duty, ignorance is a crime." -- Thomas Paine
Nov 1, 2021
Today's Reddit
A school should be a palace, and a top flight teacher should be pulling down 6 figures.
Jul 4, 2021
Who Ya Callin' Snowflake?
The nation’s summer holiday season was refreshed this year with the addition of Juneteenth National Independence Day a few weeks before the Fourth of July. The day symbolizes the end of enslavement in the United States, and its place on the federal calendar was won in large part thanks to the energy of the broad movement that emerged last year in response to the murder of George Floyd.
The speed and virtual unanimity with which June 19 joined July 4 might seem to foretell a new reckoning with America’s brutally racist past, spurred on by 2020’s push to confront injustice. Yet instead of a new era of honesty and critical inquiry, the United States is being dragged into a moral panic about anti-racism itself, as agitated parents, right-wing activists and red-state lawmakers rail against their version of critical race theory. Their assault would allow only for a “history” that holds no contemporary consequences; racism ended in the past, according to the developing backlash, and we would all be better off if we didn’t try to connect it to the present.
So in the same week when Juneteenth became a national holiday, schoolteachers in Texas, where the commemoration originally marked the end of slavery in that state, could teach about these events only at their peril: Texas now precludes any teacher from exploring the state’s own history of enslavement if any student should “feel discomfort, guilt, [or] anguish . . . on account of the individual’s race or sex.” On the federal level, the same Republican senators who voted for the Juneteenth holiday also demanded that the Education Department end its effort to encourage schools to fully explore the history of enslavement, saying the push involved “divisive, radical, and historically-dubious buzzwords and propaganda.”
In Oklahoma, Gov. Kevin Stitt signed an ill-conceived, overbroad bill that chills the long-overdue reckoning with the Tulsa Race Massacre — a vicious orgy of racist violence carried out in 1921 against one of the nation’s most affluent African American communities. This new law, passed under a special emergency provision, bans the teaching of “divisive concepts” implying that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.”
Texas and Oklahoma join a list of six states that have ratified such legislation, with more than a dozen others considering it. These laws cut off the necessary classroom discussion of racial justice and reconciliation taking shape in Tulsa, Houston, Minneapolis, Louisville, Atlanta, Chicago and other communities across the country inspired by and responsive to #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName.
Banning ‘critical race theory’ would be bad for conservatives, too
Proponents of such reactionary legislation insist that nothing in the laws bans teaching about historical racism. Technically, that’s true: The text of these laws does not necessarily mention particular historical events, critical race theory or the 1619 Project. That would be far too obvious.
Instead, the laws’ language — often eerily identical — is even more insidious: It explicitly sets out to sanction certain feelings as part of a disingenuous crackdown on racial division. In closing off room to explore the impact of America’s racist history by citing “division” — a subjective condition that turns on any student’s (or parent’s) claim to feel resentment or guilt — the laws directly threaten any teacher who pursues a sustained, critical understanding of the deeper causes, legacies or contemporary implications of racism in fomenting uncivil discord.
The hysteria about this putatively un-American inquiry is possible in part because Americans are not often taught about the policies and practices through which racism has shaped our nation. Nor do we typically teach that racist aggression against reform has been repeatedly legitimized as self-defense — an embodiment of an enduring claim that anti-racism is racism against White people.
The whole point of Confederate monuments is to celebrate white supremacy
This pattern of defending white supremacy by resorting to group interest embodies the very opposite of the individualism so frequently touted in conservative politics. Very few Americans learn that just after the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson vetoed legislation protecting the civil rights of newly freed African Americans, essentially claiming such laws to be preferential treatment for Blacks and reverse discrimination against Whites. Nor is there much candid discussion today about how the wave of White racial terrorism that destabilized Radical Reconstruction in the South was framed as self-defense. This was followed by White segregationist rule for the better part of the 20th century, buttressed by the acquiescence of the Supreme Court and the supposed greatest legal minds of the era.
The reverse-racism trope emerged again after World War II, when segregationists denounced the simple demands for nondiscrimination in public accommodations as assaults on Whites’ civil rights. Likewise, the Southern Manifesto against school desegregation, signed by dozens of White lawmakers, framed widespread resistance to the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in terms of defending White heritage and the well-being of vulnerable White schoolchildren. Unsurprisingly, White children are once again the front line in this current war against critical race theory in the classroom — it’s a tried-and-true method of racial retrenchment.
But the comfort of a ban on whatever conservatives imagine critical race theory to be will further deny students and scholars the chance to understand the past. The massacre in Tulsa a century ago is just one telling example of how the convergence of law, institutions and individuals enabled diabolical attacks on American citizens. Examining Tulsa through the prism of the real critical race theory, which I’ve been a leading scholar in developing, would involve unearthing the conditions that allowed White institutions and leaders of the time to mobilize the law to set a massacre of hundreds in motion, and uncovering the long-term consequences. The legal dimensions would include the formal deputizing and arming of White citizens, the rounding up and interning of survivors, and the filing of charges against victims for inciting violence. Oklahoma’s new law and the others around the country would apparently forbid a close look at the massacre’s legal aftermath — namely, the failure to indict or prosecute anyone. Teachers would be further discouraged from mounting a broader inquiry into the massacre’s legal backdrop — the laws that corralled Blacks into certain neighborhoods and that shored up the economic segregation of professions. The prohibition of any discussion suggesting that there are contemporary responsibilities shared by society as a whole precludes consideration of what a long-overdue commitment to justice might entail.
What is critical race theory and why did Oklahoma just ban it?
We know from the history of race in America just where sanitized and whitewashed versions of our past lead — to assumptions that yawning inequalities in health, wealth and a range of other areas are simply inherent features of American life. The fact that the 1921 Tulsa Massacre happened was always knowable — a few survivors are still alive — but without a critical confrontation with our history, the long-term impact of the massacre fades into a bloody mist.
Those who want to expand our nation’s literacy about our racial past and those who wish it to remain illegible to all but a determined few do agree on one thing: that examining our history has consequences. The disagreement becomes volatile when those who embrace America’s promises ask that we take up the truths of our history, while critics claim it is only patriotic to perpetuate a lie. (Martin Luther King Jr. warned of just this sort of turn more than 50 years ago, in “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?,” his final book before he was murdered: “In the days ahead we must not consider it unpatriotic to raise certain basic questions about our national character.”) Theirs is not a debate about ideas but rather an attempt — on behalf of the racially inequitable status quo — to shut down debate altogether.
The impulse to quash discussion of racism comes out of the same political movement that believes that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election — and that mobs ransacking the Capitol on Jan. 6 were justified in their bloodthirsty assault on democracy because they contend they were there to save it. Understood in context with parallel efforts to suppress democracy and protest, it should be clear that the stakes couldn’t be higher.
Indeed, beyond this incendiary 2022 campaign strategy lies the future of America. We cannot fight to realize our loftiest values if past and present injustices are made unspeakable. This is why anyone who marched for justice for George Floyd or Ahmaud Arbery or Breonna Taylor, anyone who can acknowledge that a sanitized history of the Civil War and Reconstruction led to nearly a century of segregation, anyone who does not want their children insulated from our nation’s past, anyone who is concerned about a creeping authoritarianism and the myths of the past that abet it, and anyone who believes in a truly multiracial democracy should be relentless in opposing the new efforts to banish anti-racist thought and speech from public institutions.
When it comes to racial reckoning, the future of our country depends not on whether we litigate who among us is guilty but whether we all see ourselves as responsible. Let us together stand up to these cynical attacks — we have seen them too many times before to fall prey to another cycle of race, reform and retrenchment.
Buncha whiny-butt pussies.
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