Tag: race

Another Professor Resigns Following Accusations She Pretended To Be Non-White

Kelly Kean Sharp resigned Tuesday from her assistant professorship at Furman University following accusations that she pretended to be non-white, a university spokesman said.

An anonymous person outed the African American history scholar through a Medium post, InsideHigherEd reported. The anonymous writer said that he or she “distantly” knew Sharp when Sharp was in graduate school at the University of California, Davis, and that Sharp only recently began identifying as Chicana.

Sharp reportedly formerly identified herself as Chicana in her Twitter profile, which has since been removed. The Medium post includes screenshots of Sharp’s tweets showing Sharp referring to her grandmother, who she calls her abuela, and describing how her abuela “came to the U.S. during WWII” and “worked hard so I could become a teacher.”

The Medium post writer said that Sharp had never spoken about being Mexican before, and the writer reportedly spoke with other colleagues who were also “confused” and asked Sharp about her “newfound identity.”

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San Diego Public Schools Will Overhaul Its Grading System To Achieve ‘Anti-Racism’

San Diego’s public schools want to be anti-racist, so they’re…abolishing the traditional grading system?

“This is part of our honest reckoning as a school district,” San Diego Unified School District Vice President Richard Barrera told a local NBC affiliate. “If we’re actually going to be an anti-racist school district, we have to confront practices like this that have gone on for years and years.”

District officials evidently believe that the practice of grading students based on their average score is racist, and that an active effort to dismantle racism necessitates a learning environment free of the pressure to turn in assignments on time. As evidence for the urgency of these changes, the district released data showing that minority students received more Ds and Fs than white students: Just 7 percent of whites received failing grades, as opposed to 23 percent of Native Americans, 23 percent of Hispanics, and 20 percent of black students.

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University Of Kentucky Segregated Residential Assistance Training By Race, Sent White People To ‘White Accountability Space’

Whites and non-whites training to be Residential Assistants at the University of Kentucky were segregated according to their race and put through different presentations.

The separate trainings were provided to Young America’s Foundation through the organization’s Campus Bias Tip Line, which included emails and documents about the training. White RAs were sent to a “White Accountability Space” where they were given a document that listed 41 “common racist behaviors and attitudes of white people.”

Number one on the list states that white people “believe they have ‘earned’ what they have, rather than acknowledge the extensive white privilege and unearned advantages they receive” and “believe that if people of color just worked harder …” The list also includes claims that white people don’t “notice the daily indignities that people of color experience; deny them and rationalize them away with PLEs (perfectly logical explanations),” “resent taking direction from a person of color,” and tend to ask “people of color to repeat what they have said.”

Brandon Colbert from the university’s Bias Incident Support Services offered a presentation for the training allegedly talking about “microaggressions and microinvalidations in the workplace and the harm that they cause.”

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Math Association Say Math “Inherently Carries Human Biases”, Citing Critical Race Theory

The MAA is a professional association of high school and university teachers. It hosts the American Mathematics Competitions for middle and high school students, as well as publishes academic journals. It prides itself as “the world’s largest community of mathematicians, students, and enthusiasts.”

In opposition to President Trump’s recent executive actions to ban the use of Critical Race Theory training in the federal government, the MAA said that critical race theory “is an established social science inquiry which is grounded in decades of scholarship,” further asserting that “it is misguided, at best, to reduce this theory to the race-blaming of white people and to define it and the discussion of systemic racism as a ‘divisive concept.’”

The statement then turned its attention to the inherent bias that allegedly exists in mathematics.

“Although mathematics, science, and higher education develop fact-based theories and practices that should inform policy, they are also political because they exist within a highly politicized system,” says the statement.

“Acknowledging that the United States has serious systemic discrimination has somehow leaped from a political issue to a partisan issue.”

In conclusion, the MMA says that “it is time for all members of our profession to acknowledge that mathematics is created by humans and therefore inherently carries human biases.”

“Until this occurs, our community and our students cannot reach full potential. Reaching this potential in mathematics relies upon the academy and higher education engaging in critical, challenging, sometimes uncomfortable conversations about the detrimental effects of race and racism on our community,” the MMA added. 

Several American university professors signed the document. Among these are Jenna Carpenter, the Dean of Engineering at Campbell University and Victor Piercey, an actuarial sciences professor at Ferris State University.

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