Ethnic-studies filmmakers seem fine with political brainwashing
by Doug MacEachern, Apr. 21, 2012 The Republic
Shortly after the Tucson Unified School District officially shut down its Mexican-American studies classes, one of the activist-instructors recorded an audiotape regarding a conundrum he faced.
It was a staged discussion. Curtis Acosta is a gifted, theatrical political activist who knows how to manipulate his audience. And in this taped “chat,” he lamented the classroom restrictions he now faced.
He could no longer use Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” as a political tool. The horror.
He could teach it, certainly. The silly nonsense about “banned” books notwithstanding, he just couldn’t use it in a way that ensured his students would leave his classroom thinking the “right” thoughts.
“I teach it through its ‘critical race theory’ lens, or its ‘critical feminist’ lens,” he said. “I do both, actually.”
“The Tempest,” for Acosta, is a tool not for opening minds to the joy of great literature, but about the evils of “oppression and racism” perpetrated by a “European man from Italy, the duke of Milan.”
It was impossible, he concluded, for him to teach it any other way.
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