She smiled and hid; bobbed her head and giggled. She told me I brought her the best gift ever. Then she said ‘just kidding; you’re the best gift ever’. She hugged me with both arms. Then she told me she has bruises from her new group home. And then I stood in the parking lot and waved goodbye until she was gone.

in the ‘shit they don’t teach you in school about the civil war’ department

vladislava:

this-is-not-jewish:

5evamore:

this-is-not-jewish:

I took AP American History from a teacher who prided herself on making her students read primary sources giving the perspective of groups who were excluded from power.

I didn’t learn about this (or Leo Frank, or Henry Ford’s The International Jew, or Father Coughlin, or the MS St. Louis, or the fact that the owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory—who locked their Jewish and Italian immigrant workers in during work hours, which prevented them from escaping when a fire broke out —were acquitted of manslaughter in large part by attacking the credibility of a Jewish survivor testifying against them, or pretty much anything having to do with anti-Semitism in America) until years after her class.

Yeah.

The really weird thing about the Triangle fire and the following case was that the men who owned the factory, Blanck and Harris, were both Jewish immigrants. 

Actually, historically, it’s not that weird. One of the unspoken realities of American Jewish history is that when major Eastern European Jewish immigration happened, the Jews who were already established in America (who were primarily well-educated and assimilationist) did everything they could to disassociate and distance themselves from the immigrants (who were generally impoverished, poorly educated, and traditionalist) for fear that the immigrants’ “alienness” would undo their own progress toward acceptance. American Jewish history in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is rife with stories of Jews mistreating other Jews in pursuit of white acceptance…which, as the story of Leo Frank and the subsequent northward flight of Georgia Jews (overwhelmingly assimilated, American born Jews—my own great-grandfather included) shows, didn’t even work.

Sigh.

There’s this part in Leslie Feinberg’s Drag King Dreams (really wonderful book, by the way) where the protagonist, Max Rabinowitz, remembers an incident at their mother’s NYC sweatshop. Max’s mother was hurt by the sewing machine and the sweatshop’s (Jewish) foreman yelled at all the (Jewish) women comforting her, telling them to get back to work.

Later, still humiliated by how he’d talked to her, I asked my mother how the foreman could treat his own people that way. “He is not your people.” She seemed so angry at my question. She held up her wounded finger, a spot of red blood seeping through the white bandage. “The ones at work whose fingers look like this, they are your people.”

Read the entire quote (linked to above) because it’s beautiful, but yeah — a relevant excerpt.

I was prepared for tomorrow to be my last day with this student but she’s not in school tomorrow. Today was my last day. And I was not prepared. And I’m really quite unhappy about it. 

before I go to bed I just want to make sure i’ll remember when she glued the friend label to my arm. when I told her I trusted her and she asked why and I told her and she said I was the only adult that did and I said I know and I’m sorry. When she told me I was her best friend and my heart broke because she deserves better and because I don’t think the other staff would approve.

schools are so damaging. i really loved my high school experience (overall, as seen through some pretty heavy nostalgia lenses). i know it was because i fit the design roughly but also there must be something that my school was doing better. because from what i see now… schools suck. i do not understand how they see students and how they define success and i am very very tired and i want to go home and i want to take some of the kids away from that place too and protect them from all the ridiculous punitive ‘education’ methods.