So much for content of character

A group of parents in Oberlin, Ohio are fighting the assignment of a teacher based on race.

That’s what it really comes down to, as various black parents are arguing against the scheduling of a white teacher to teach a black history class.

Because of a scheduling conflict, the black teacher who has taught the course for the past several years may not be able to this year.

Phyllis Yarber Hogan, a member of the Oberlin Black Alliance for Progress, said a white teacher wouldn’t be well-suited to teaching students about subjects like slavery. “When you talk about slavery, students need to understand it is not our fault,” she said. “Our ancestors did nothing wrong to be enslaved.
“How do you work through that when the person teaching it is the same type of person who did the enslaving?”

Right. White people can’t teach black history (or about slavery) because slavery was done by white people, not black people.

Never mind that there was a flourishing slave trade in sub-Saharan Africa, managed and participated in by blacks, who found white slavers to be just another market, along with Arabs and other blacks.

And never mind that the argument seems to say that African-Americans have more in common with their black slave ancestors, and white Americans have more in common with white slavers of the past, than they have in common with each other. Is that the lesson we really want to teach?

May we conclude that only women should teach women’s history, only poets should teach poetry, and only robots should teach computer science? Would my Italian background make be better suited to teach the history of Rome?

Or, more pointedly, would my white skin make me more appropriate able to teach US history as a whole — what with all its white Presidents and white generals and white historical figures, let alone all those white Founding Fathers (hmmm, better be male, too) — than a black teacher?

Michael Williams, interim director of Cleveland State University’s black studies program, said schools should choose a black teacher if that person is most qualified, not just because the teacher happens to be black.
If two teachers are equally qualified, Williams gives the edge to the black teacher. “That person still has the advantage of the culture,” said Williams, who is black. “They understand the nuances of the culture.”

I guess the answer would be “Yes,” then. Obviously I “understand the nuances of the [white] culture” better than a black teacher could — and the “nuances of the [male] culture” better than a woman. I clearly understand the “nuances of the [US] culture” better than any foreign-born teacher could. Being of British descent, too, I would obviously be better qualified to understand the “nuances of [British] culture” in teaching English Lit than, say, an African American, a Japanese American, or a Hispanic American.

Is that really the path we want to be going down?

(via David Bernstein)