TED Conferences’ Post

Learning from a professor I worked with, I tell my students each semester that being uncomfortable is NOT a bad thing---that sometimes we need to learn to be able to sit in the uncomfortable for awhile in order to learn something new. I feel we, as a nation, have lost the ability to be uncomfortable, to talk openly and respectfully, and to disagree. A year ago, I was in an interview with an undergraduate. The question was "How do you respond to a coworker who's disrespected you?" Their answer? Cut them off. Get rid of them. Since then, I stress to my students to keep open minds in uncomfortable conversations. Race, misogyny, and, especially now, antisemitism and Islamophobia are likely to crop up as topics in classes. Often, people who broach the conversation and broach it possibly in the wrong wording are TRYING to learn. They're trying to engage in an area they probably haven't been engaged in before (very true for students from religious, small towns). So, I tell my students to have patience and understanding---that more likely than not they aren't trying to insult you but UNDERSTAND you and they're asking for guidance. Students are TERRIFIED of being "cancelled." They don't want to speak openly in fear of retribution when by NOT speaking they are preventing themselves from engaging outside of themselves. Encourage being uncomfortable.

The Power of an Open Table: My Commitment to Inclusivity! Embracing Mellody Hobson’s wisdom, let’s strive to be color brave, not color blind! What a great reminder for all of us to be courageous, be bold, be kind, and be the first to initiate conversations with people who do not look like us, talk like us, think like us, act like us, or even share our beliefs. Be ruthlessly realistic, brutally pragmatic, and say yes to diversity for a strategic advantage in our workplaces. We cannot fully understand each other’s experiences, but we can commit to learning. Drawing on my experiences as a military brat, where I regularly joined tight knit communities as an outsider, I intentionally seek out empty tables and invite strangers to join me, or I join tables where I do not know anyone. What unique actions do you take to be color brave and why? #Inclusivity #Diversity #ColorBrave #OpenTable

so think and vote

Good Article by Donna Britt!

THIS IS NOT 25,000 It might reach 1,000 but closer to 500 from my experience. Fascism is not inevitable. It is slow and annoying but it is dying right before our eyes. EVER THUS FOR FASCISTS. @2:40 He's talking about blacks and hispanics not having housing. I mean come on. Does no one remember the 70's 80's and 90's when Trump (and his father before him) were famous for being slumlords and never renting to blacks or hispanics? Imo, the people that put together Project 2025 are all traitors to The United States because they are attempting to throw away The Constitution, forever changing every single person's rights in a second. All they want is power. They will fight each other for it if no one else is around to fight. These are not people that should be running a country. They should be in jail for OPENLY ATTEMPTING TO SUBVERT THE LAWS AND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES IN A COUP AGAINST THE AMERICAN PEOPLE TO CHANGE OUR SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT FROM REPRESENTATIONAL TO A NON-REPRESENTATIONAL DICTATORSHIP WHERE WE HAVE ONLY THE RIGHTS GIVEN BY THE GREAT LEADER. That's not America. That's a white nationalist hellscape for every non-loyalist and a blight on the world. #maga #project2025 #trump #propaganda #misinformation #crowdsize #tinycrowd #nosupport #trumpsmells

America's racism always being present from the creation of the Republic to these days, because the Eurocentric mentality on the white population, it's in their genes, but during Trump failed administration America's white people start feeling safe to show's their Racism, to the point that now we have politicians in Washington that even express their racist view out loud without any political consequence, I remember that before Trump if a politician talk like that, automatically was committing political suicide, but now our country is been poison by the white supremacist fearmongering and the white elite, that people no longer feels any shame in such nasty and ignorant rhetoric. How we fall so low? Eurocentrism (also Eurocentricity or Western centrism) refers to viewing the West as the center of world events or superior to all other cultures. The exact scope of Eurocentrism varies from the entire Western world to just the continent of Europe or even more narrowly. When the term is applied historically, it may be used in reference to the presentation of the European perspective on history as objective or absolute, or to an apologetic stance toward European colonialism and other forms of imperialism. There remains a widespread sentiment that the Indigenous populations of the Awarak, Taino, and Lucayan from which Italian explorer Christopher Columbus discovered in 1492 was, by many accounts, “barbaric savages.” Childlike, violent, godless, deficient in government, technology, philosophy, and other distinctive features that at the time was viewed as necessary elements in the formation of an authentic civilization. Conversely, Columbus has often been, until most recently, popularly understood as the representative of a civilized Eurocentric worldview whose advancements in the areas of government, technology, and philosophy, amongst other societal functions, transformed him into a bearer of development that elevated the statuses of the “inferior” indigenous populations. Future settlers and colonizers of the Americas would also perceive and widely perpetuate this construct of American history. This doctrine has manifested itself in a variety of destructive ways, including the consideration that the persecution of the native populations of America was an inevitable but fundamentally positive outcome. The Eurocentric mentality in neocolonialism refers to a worldview that places European culture and values at the center, often viewing non-European societies as inferior or in need of "civilization." This mentality promotes the idea that Western nations have the right to intervene in the affairs of other countries for perceived benefits, contributing to economic dominance and cultural hegemony.

In Part 1, Jean discussed how we got here, beginning with the outrage over George Floyd’s murder. First, we saw a multiracial coalition, then the inevitable backlash. In Part 2: What tools do we have to accelerate change? Jean discusses transitional justice and the race class narrative: what works, what doesn’t, and how to stay the course. #Justice #Change

Just the numbers

What an eloquent description of Critical Race Theory. My favorite sentence in this article is that critical race theory is a verb not a noun. It explains the construct of race in our society and how it impacts all of us negatively.