Holding the Smog-Breathers Accountable

My mom was born in South Africa, and when I was in the fifth grade, everybody asked why I was not black. I remember thinking how ignorant these kids were, and wondering why they thought everybody born in Africa was automatically a person of color. There were times where I felt bullied, and I was uncertain about my identity. Here I was being told that I should be black, when the color of my skin was white. As a child, …

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November 8, 2016: The Week After

I cried when I found out the results of the 2016 presidential election. I cried hard. I fell asleep the night before quite early, because I was tired of being bombarded with political ads and the disgusting hate that I would see every day on Facebook. I went to bed early believing that I would wake up to Hillary Clinton being our next president. It didn’t happen that way and the several paragraphs that were posted by each person on …

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Politics with Kids

Special Guest Post by Ginelle Wolfe ’16 I knew work would be tough the day after the election because I work with kids at an elementary school. Each teacher I talked to said they were not going to discuss the election, as the assumption is that most students would not even understand what happened. While I understand that approach, my situation is a little bit different. I teach English Language Development classes, so the majority of my students are not …

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Whiteness as Social Capital

Recently I was listening to an episode of the podcast About Race, a podcast where 3 hosts discuss current race issues in an open way. One of the hosts mentioned that black assimilation to white culture as a solution to race disparity is problematic.  They looked at a specific study that showed that black people who moved to white middle-class neighborhoods before they were twelve had a “compound interest of awesomeness” where they were more likely to succeed academically and …

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Can a White Person be a Good Ally?

After stumbling upon Macklemore’s “White Privilege II,” I was excited to hear what he had to say. It felt like a direct application of the concepts that we had been learning in Contemporary Racism. The song directly references protest slogans from the Black Lives Matter Movement, police brutality, the double standard of hip-hop, and (of course) white privilege. He goes as far as to call himself out for the base of his fame from—and the history surrounding—cultural appropriation of Black …

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Protesting #101

On April 13th, Muhlenberg College participated in a nationwide day of action against racism and student debt by participating in the #MillionStudentMarch. This movement is a united demand for education as a human right. The movement seeks to gain 1) tuition-free public college, 2) cancellation of all student debt, 3) a $15 minimum wage for all campus workers, and 4) divestment from private prisons by all colleges and universities. Our Contemporary Racism class thought that it would be a good …

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An Outside Perspective on the Million Student March

On Friday, Muhlenberg participated in the Million Student March. The Million Student March is an event held at colleges to demand tuition-free public college, cancellation of all student debt, a $15/hour minimum wage for all campus workers, and divestment from private prisons. As a class, we were informed of the protest and its goals, and then headed over to take part, as a sort of exercise in allyship. There, the student organizing the protest gave us an explanation of their …

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