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It is important to understand that the system of advantage is perpetuated when we do not acknowledge its existence.
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Beverly Daniel Tatum |
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For many people of color, learning to break the silence is a survival issue. To remain silent would be to disconnect from her own experience, to swallow and internalize her own oppression.The cost of silence is too high.
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Beverly Daniel Tatum |
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In a situation of unequal power, a subordinate group has to focus on survival. It becomes very important for the subordinates to become highly attuned to the dominants as a way of protecting themselves from them.
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Beverly Daniel Tatum |
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The relevant question is not whether all Whites are racist but how we can move more White people from a position of active or passive racism to one of active antiracism.
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Beverly Daniel Tatum |
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Children who have been silenced often enough learn not to talk about race publicly. Their questions don't go away, they just go unasked.
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Beverly Daniel Tatum |
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Learning to spot "that stuff "--whether it is racist, or sexist, or classist--is an important skill for children to develop."
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Beverly Daniel Tatum |
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Social psychologist Susan Fiske writes,"It is a simple principle: People pay attention to those who control their outcomes. In an effort to predict and possibly influence what is going to happen to them, people gather information about those with power."11"
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Beverly Daniel Tatum |
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While I think it is necessary to be honest about the racism of our past and present, it is also necessary to empower children (and adults) with the vision that change is possible. Concrete examples are critical.
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Beverly Daniel Tatum |
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Sometimes the assumptions we make about others come not from what we have been told or what we have seen on television or in books, but rather rom what we have not been told. The distortion of historical information about people of color leads young people (and older people to) to make assumptions that may go unchallenged for a long time.
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Beverly Daniel Tatum |
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Regardless of your subject matter, there are ways to engage students in critical thinking about racism which are relevant to your discipline.
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Beverly Daniel Tatum |
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Resisting the stereotypes and affirming other definitions of themselves is part of the task facing young Black women in both White and Black communities.
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Beverly Daniel Tatum |
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Unfortunately for Black teenagers, those cultural stereotypes do not usually include academic achievement.
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Beverly Daniel Tatum |
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If young people are exposed to images of African American academic achievement in their early years, they won't have to define school achievement as something for Whites only. They will know that there is a long history of Black intellectual achievement.
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Beverly Daniel Tatum |
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The task of resisting our own oppression does not relieve us of the responsibility of acknowledging the complicity in the oppression of others.
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Beverly Daniel Tatum |
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Despair is an act of resignation I am not willing to make.
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Beverly Daniel Tatum |