L.A. Teachers Fired for Being Too "Afro-centric"

Yeah. You read right, folks. There're a few links with the details. But basically, it works like this:

A teacher in Watts, Karen Salazar, contextualized her lessons so they would be more relevant to her mostly black students. Administrators accuse her of being too "Afro-centric" and brainwashing the kids.

Ostensibly, as I've learned from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen, part of the problem with being too "Afro-centric" is that children may not love America. Oh. The horror.

This also illustrates the truth that black students don't refer to academic achievement as "acting white" for nothing. I've been there. You have to sit and listen to lies, exaggerations, denials, and half-truths, and become proficcient in reciting said lied, exagerrations, denials, and half-truths. I know did. And I hated it. This teacher shouldn't be fired. She should be given a gold medal. But her firing illustrates part of my reluctance to go into primary and secondary education. If she can get fired in Los Angeles, California for using 3-pages of the Autobiography of Malcolm X, a rap by the late Tupac Shukar, and a Langston Hughes poem, when I start teaching about the horror of slavery, the re-enslavement of African Americans after the Civil War, and the dozens of white racist riots around the country (And by that I mean, a least couple of dozens. There were probably more.), the African societies the slaves came from, the Black Freedom Movement and the backlash to the Movement - I could not just lose my job, they might even take my kids!

No, I don't have any, but you get my point. This firing is nonsense. And it's not the Los Angeles United School District that's "unique" here. Ms. Salazar is the unique one. Not many teachers take the chance she did. And kudos to her.

Here are those other links:
Feminsite
L.A. Times
VivirLatino
AngryBrownButch
Democracy Now!