Southern California teacher Karen Salazar has been let go from Jordan High School because she was "brainwashing" students with an Afrocentric curriculum. Salazar's mentor, a veteran teacher assigned to her, disagrees:

"I did not see the same things that the administrator said he saw," said Miranda Manners, who observed the same lesson during a different class period. "I saw a new, young teacher teaching her lesson according to the objectives she stated on the board. I saw her engage with her students and interacting with them in a very positive way."

Among Salazar's "missteps"? Teaching excerpts from Malcolm X, a book approved for use by the LA Unifed School District, having her students read the poetry of Langston Hughes, and quoting the late rapper Tupac Shakur.

A Rose is A Rose explains why all students should read about Malcolm X :

i'm NOT a big fan of tupac's. ok, i'm NOT a fan at all. in any way shape or form. however, i think it's important all students should learn about malcolm x AND hear/read the words of langston hughes. malcolm x in the beginning of his conversion preached separation and unkindness to people whose skin color was different than his. at the end of his life, he realized that wasn't the way to go. he was a part of american history and we should ALL know about him. like him or not

For more details, see the Save Salazar wiki and the Los Angeles Times article from which the mentor teacher's quote was drawn.

AngryBrownButch finds the firing reprehensible:

Keeping American students in the dark about America’s wrongdoings, keeping Latino, Black and other students of color from truly understanding their histories in the U.S. - that’s all key to maintaining white supremacy and white privilege in this country. If students need to go out of their way to learn the truth, they’re less likely to get angry about it, less likely to do something about it. That’s why community education is so crucial - to teach kids and adults alike everything that the schools are deliberately leaving out in an effort to exert control. And these elements of school curricula are so widespread, so normalized, so accepted that when an educator tries to break away from it even just a little, they’re the ones being accused of brainwashing students.

If it wasn’t so dangerous and so damaging, it would be funny. Instead, it’s fucking infuriating.

It is shameful that we assume that U.S. literature and history must be taught from a Eurocentric perspective. Why do U.S. history classes and textbooks always seem to start on the East Coast and move westward? Why not start that story on the west coast and move east? It would still be chronological--but it would be a very different story.

Why not center our teaching in our students' lives? Why not begin with their interests and build outward? This method was pioneered 100 years ago in elementary school science, when students were encouraged to explore their world in mini field trips on and around the school grounds. Why not also use this method in English and history classes? There's no harm in saying to a class of students in Watts, "Here's what people who look like you, who share your experiences, have written, and here's why we value those texts"--and here, now, are the kinds of sentiments (by white authors) to which they were responding."

And why not challenge white students (and middle-class students of all ethnicities) with something different from literature-as-usual? We should be asking them to read literature that is outside of their comfort zones. That's how we grow as people--by having our beliefs challenged, and then defending and/or modifying our worldview accordingly.

Feminist standpoint theorists like Nancy Hartsock, Sandra Harding, and Donna Haraway ask us to consider where knowledge is situated--that is, from where is the author speaking? Do we let him get away with, as Donna Haraway calls it, "the god trick," speaking from a disembodied place? What happens if we challenge our students to begin with women's lives, or the lives of people of color, or of the poor--and if we ask them to do this before they enter college?

My hunch is that we'd have more students of color engaged with American literature and culture and history, and that more of them would go on to college. As it is, only the most engaged students tend to seek out information on coalition-building and contemporary and historical activism.

Again and again in recent weeks, I've been reminded (ABC's Chief Washington Correspondent George Stephanopoulos using the phrase "the opposite race"; the Obama sock monkey; that e-mail that's been forwarded around comparing flooded Iowans with waterlogged New Orleans residents) that many (most?) Americans--and especially white Americans--lack the vocabulary or the wherewithal to talk about race because they have no education to draw upon. Experiences, maybe, but not education. Americans of all ethnicities learn to talk about race by listening to our parents, our televisions, and our radios. We need instead to learn to talk about race (to talk about it and be talked to) from listening to one another, and from learning about all Americans' histories and cultures in our public schools.

How are you teaching your children to talk about race? What vocabulary do they have for engaging with race and racism? And what would you think about enrolling your child in Karen Salazar's English class?

Leslie Madsen-Brooks helps university faculty improve their teaching. She blogs at The Clutter Museum, Museum Blogging, and The Multicultural Toy Box.