When I sit in my policy class, I almost always sit in one of the middle seats, just so I can pay more attention. However, today I took a seat by the door so I could storm out...and maybe throw a chair on my way.
Our subject this week was discrimination. One of our assignments was to watch a discussion on-line between three SW professors. They were discussing gay marriage. I would say they were debating it but nobody presented a decent argument for it. Then they got into hate crimes and one of the guys actually said that attacks on gays because they are gay is not a hate crime because it's just sex. With that concept (coming from a social work professor!) haunting me, I went into class, preparing to do battle.
What I actually found was that the entire class agreed with me that the discussion was bullshit and there was no debate about it. Maybe some people in class thought a different way but that's not the feeling that I got. While I was upset that I had to watch that debate, I was glad to feel even more support in class.
Also, we watched a documentary about school integration and I discovered a new hero, Minnijean Brown-Trickey. She was one of the Little Rock Nine, a group of black students who were the first to integrate Little Rock Central High School in 1957. She was also the only one of the nine to get kicked out. While in the lunch line one day, a white boy was giving her shit and she couldn't take it anymore so she dumped a bowl of chili on his head. They said that the white students were dumbstruck as they had probably never seen a person of color, let alone a high school girl, fight back.
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