OK, there is no such word, but the claim is still true.
The majority of what he teaches us was published before 2019, the year How to be an Antiracist was published and the year that all the knowledge of the world was effectively put into the socially just perspective of power, privilege, and victimhood. He tells us that he teaches pre-Kendian knowledge so that we can understand how we know what we know. But he just doesn’t get it that that so much of the information he teaches us is really disinformation created by cisheteronormative white male supremacists to gain power over peoples in historically marginalized BIPOC and LBGTQ+ communities. He does not realize that just hearing their Eurocentric names and seeing their white faces does violence to us. He does not realize that the purpose of an education is to create a world of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and teaching us about the foundation of our knowledge and his emphasis on the scientific method is racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and violent. It is a sign of whiteness. To quote myself, “I have a nightmare.”
The semester is half over and he hasn’t even mentioned his preferred pronouns or asked us ours. He also mentions his wife in class as if marriage between a man and a women is a natural thing. He is so homo- and transphobic.
He even told us that the best compliment he ever got in his life was from his sixth grade teacher who told his mother that he reminded her of Huckleberry Finn–the protagonist in the justly banned racist tome written in the paleo days. Perhaps my professor would have thought more like us had Ritalin or Adderall been around when he was in elementary school.
My professor taught us about colorblindness–a word that makes my skin crawl. Not only did he use such a hurtful word when he described the neurodiverse ways that people see, but he also told us that the trait was sex-linked without explaining that gender trumps sex and that gender is fluid and non-binary. He just does not get it. Like I said, “I have a nightmare.”
I need this nightmare of a class to graduate, but there is a silver lining. I now not only define myself as an antiracist but also as an antipaleosapien–a word that encompasses all my virtuous antithoughts and antifeelings.
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