Brilliant: No, they need to be taught that all norms are not transferable into all worlds. In my case, physical assertiveness might save you on the street but not beyond it. At the same time, other values are transferrable and highly useful. The cultural norms of my community also asserted that much of what my country believes about itself is a lie. In the spirit of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Malcolm X, it was my responsibility to live, prosper, and attack the lie. Those values saved me on the street, and they sustain me in this present moment. People who take a strict binary view of culture (culture of privilege = awesome; culture of poverty = fail) are afflicted by the provincialism of privilege and thus vastly underestimate the dynamism of the greater world. They extoll middle-class values to the ignorance and exclusion of all others. To understand, you must imagine what it means to confront algebra in the morning and Shorty, can I see your bike? in the afternoon. Its very nice to talk about middle-class values when that describes your small, limited world. But when your grandmother lives in one hood and your coworkers live another, you generally need something more than middle-class values. You need to be bilingual. #codeswitching #inourblood theatlantic/politics/archive/2014/03/other-peoples-pathologies/359841/ Tiq Milan, read this whole thing my love, its so rich.
Posted on: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 21:59:56 +0000
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