ESPM50AC is not what I expected, for the worse.

I think there are two sides to the story. You sound like you are not open to the ideas and feel that your personal anecdote disproves many of the narratives taught in the class. But you are just one person. On average the things you say they are teaching in the class are true.

There is a good point to be made about not telling people that they are inferior and have no chance. But I am a minority and no one ever told me I was inferior because of my race. Race has factored into many aspects of my life, and I was lucky enough to have parents who stressed education. And on top of my parents, I just have a natural tendency to not give a fuck about what everyone else around me is doing and always strive for my own thing. I don't know about your background but I sometimes do feel like I am a unicorn. Every day in my STEM classes I look around and I am without exaggeration the ONLY one of my kind in lectures of 100+ people (in terms of race). So while I am a counter-example to some of the narratives, the fact that I'm so rare where I am is also supportive of those narratives.

But for every person like you or me there are people who don't even know they have a chance. Not because white people or liberals are telling them they don't have a chance, but because they are a product of their environments. Everyone they know, everyone who looks like them, for the entire time they are growing up, has a shitty education and a shitty job. How are they supposed to know that things can be better for them? Most likely the school they go to is full of other people in their same situation.

Sit on the bus with a group of minority kids as I do every morning and you can get the sense that there is no one at all in their life that tells them about the importance of education. Where are they going to learn the life skills they need to get to a college like Berkeley in the first place, when no one is even looking out for them to make sure they do well in high school, or middle school, or elementary school? All their friends are all about hanging out, going to parties, doing drugs, etc. I grew up in a different neighborhood than my cousins, but when I see these kids on the bus they remind me of my cousins. They are all working low wage jobs now, and I got to see first hand how my parents were the difference between me and them. When we were kids I didn't think I was smarter than my cousins. But my parents forced me to do well in school, while theirs didn't. It wasn't because their parents bought into the myth that they couldn't succeed that some white person told them. It's because their entire world supported that as an implicit reality. I can't understand why or how my parents didn't fall into that but I'm extremely privileged to have been born to them. I feel like an alien in my own family at family gatherings now. When I visit I don't give a shit mostly, about most things that my family talk about, and when they ask me about what I'm up to their eyes glass over if I talk about things I'm interested in or about my aspirations. We grew up together but my as well be from different worlds.

You are right that for someone who believes in themselves and who is putting in the effort, it is absolutely possible to change their lot in life. But most people that your AC class is talking about don't fall into that category. In my case I did have a form of privilege in that my parents instilled in me the value of education. I have still experienced racism. People every now and then have yelled racial slurs at me from their cars as I was walking to class in Berkeley. Even though I am fit, educated, and on my way to having a decent career there are huge swaths of the female population who will never consider me as a potential dating partner simply because of the color of my skin. I have to prove myself academically to every group of students I interact with each new class, every semester, to get them to accept that I am someone who can contribute to the study group or do homework with (and most of the time I end up getting better grades than most of the people who make these assumptions about me).

I would recommend you approach the class from the standpoint of just learning the arguments that they are making. Economic mobility is a myth from the standpoint that it's an ideal that's widely taught as part of our culture. But in reality it's not nearly as common as one might believe growing up hearing "you can be anything you want to be". Technically it is true, you can be anything, but most people die in the same social class they were born into. Colonialism brought a lot of bad things into the world, you can't deny that. But I doubt the class is flat out saying that it did nothing good in your class. The point of a class like this is that in typical public school K-12 education all you are taught is the sugar coated version of history where Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and maybe you learned a lot of Native Americans died, and that slavery was bad and Lincoln ended it and racism was bad. But it was abstract. EVERYONE knows the good and progress that history has brought, including things like Colonialism. But that's the whole point of this class, is that everyone should also know the drawbacks, the downsides.

Classes like this go into the details of how things were and how that transitioned slowly into the world we have today. If you can't see that history was in many ways very racist and led us to the place we are at today, and if upon hearing these viewpoints your only reaction is to try to immediately refute them, then I think your mind is closed and I'm sad to hear that the opportunity to learn some different viewpoints and incorporate them, even if to a very small degree, into your understanding of the world, is being lost on you. Everyone knows the good about America, but people should also know the darker sides to it. The things that need improvement.

If you are tired of SJW's though, I do agree with you on that. There are some people who take this stuff way overboard. Case in point, look at all the recent idiotic opinion pieces by people on the dailycal about the Milo protests. Especially the one that had "check your privilege" in the title TRIGGERED! Oh man I rubbed my hands together when I saw the title of that one, in anticipation of the stupidity I was about to be exposed to, and I was not disappointed. But don't let people like that dissuade you from thinking critically and looking at these alternate narratives. Challenge yourself to see it from the other side if you ever feel like you immediately can shoot down an idea. Why does this alternate viewpoint exist? Have I ever considered it? Why or why not? Why do other people spend time thinking about or teaching it?

And your statement that privileged white people are telling PoC not to even bother trying is surprising. I don't get where you are coming from with that. When people try to talk about these issues it's to try to make society find a way to improve them, not to try to tell people not to try until white people have solved the problem.

/r/berkeley Thread