I’m an Asian-Am kid from San Bernardino County, two years out of high school, now at Ms. Salazar’s alma mater.

I read Malcolm X’s “My First Conk” my junior year in high school and nobody said boo. That was in a multiethnic class with a white English teacher. In LA, a teacher teaches Malcolm X and gets fired.

(And they say political correctness is a loony radical leftist thing!)

“Out On The Stoop” mentions Karen teaching Langston Hughes:

http://outonthestoop.blogspot.com/2008/06/solidarity-with-karen-salazar-knowledge.html

Hughes (and Malcolm X, though he wasn’t primarily a writer) represent some of the best literary work that America (and when I say “America”, I mean home-grown American nationals) has produced. Why is teaching good American writing “Afro-centric,” “subversive,” or a firing offense?

They’re right: If you can’t teach Malcolm X and Langston Hughes in an American high school classroom, there is something deeply wrong with the US.

My mom’s parents came from Indonesia to guarantee their children (and later, grandchildren) quality American education. Perhaps I should send my children back?

The home-school and charter school movement have one thing right: Our public schools are weak, particularly because they don’t teach everything they can about our heritage as Americans–what it means to be American, and how our definitions of it have come to be as they are.

Malcolm and Langston are part of the literary history of the country I love, the country that took my family in, they country I was born in and choose to live for. My younger cousins and my future children deserve to know about them.

Sarnoff is the new McCarthy.

You said it friend! Working with teens today, I find that they are very much aware of this plot but are discouraged and completely apathetic b/c they don’t think they can do anything about this. Can you imagine the movement we’d have on our hands if more teachers educated their students of the true history of Black, Latino, & other people of color’s history? The TRUE history. Not the history that barely recognizes leaders of from various cultures or even worse - labels them as Terrorists.

What’s that African proverb: “Until lions tell the tale, the story of the hunt will always glorify the hunter”

Kudos to Ms. Salazar for daring to tell the tale of the lions.

Sarnoff, what you’re interested in is nation-building indoctrination of kids who probably have a bit more of a global perspective. A number of them probably know when they’re being lied to anyway. I did.