As much as we hate putting their names in the same sentence, there is a parallel between the campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump: both candidates are whipping up the enthusiasm of their followers. In Bernie’s case, of course, we see this as wonderful, a genuine progressive movement that could lead the country a long way toward a focus on people rather than profit. Trump, on the other hand, is whipping up the enthusiasm of the gun-loving white supremacists. At first he was funny, so outrageously out there it was a joke. But then we discover that no, actually, […]
Since school is about to start all around the country, I want to talk about one of my favorite educational concepts, the zone of proximal development (ZPD). Developed by Soviet psychologist and educator Vygotsky, the idea is that if you give a students work that’s too easy, they’re not going to learn that much. If you give them work that’s too hard, they will be frustrated and unable to learn that much. But if you find precisely the next step they need to take in the learning process and you give them a little help, they will learn rapidly. This […]
Like many people, Black and white, I was disheartened by Black Lives Matter disrupting yet another Bernie Sanders rally yesterday (August 8, 2015). I was hopeful that after the first time – which I supported – that the Sanders campaign would take aggressive steps to bridge the gap, and it looked to me that at least they were trying. But then it occurred to me that we’ve been missing something. There’s a reason that the war against Black people has been escalating in the last year, or maybe less visibly, in the past 30 years: the increasing concentration of wealth […]
Why White Knight? The first reason is fully self-serving: any week now my first published novel will be announced on Facebook posts near you: White Knight or How One Man came to Believe that He was the One that caused the San Francisco City Hall Killings and the Jonestown Massacre. The second reason is that I want to own my whiteness. White is a characteristic created by racism just as surely as is Black. Of course, they’re not parallel categories. To be called White, you have to be pure, not a trace of darker blood. But to be Black? A […]