Learning from my students and their culture

Went to the World Affairs Council with 4 students. The speaker was the Ambassador to the United States from Sudan. The man is controversial because he states that the situation is over exaggerated. This guy was good. Slick Dick motherfucker. He could talk his way up, down, and around a subject. Real good at making interesting but inexact analogies. So he was real interesting to listen to and watch in action. He'd be a pimp if he lived in the ghetto. He did a dry run with the students and then he did the same bit with the World Affairs council.

Everyone else in the room was completely quiet and respectful. The room was predominately white upper middle class and . Here I come with 2 African American girls, 1 Vietnamese girl, and 1 Latina. One of my African American students just couldn't sit and listen to his BS a second time around. She kept making sighs of disgust and other distracting noises. At one point this upper middle class white high school girl in dress and demeanor hands back a note that says, "Dude, let make him seem impolite and not us." BTW, the word "not" was underlined. At one point I even calmed my student down.

After I got to think about it more though I am really proud of my student and ashamed of myself. I was just sitting and enjoying watching this smooth motherfucker run his game on the audience and the audience just sat there. Questions were written on a card and moderated. In Philly the guy had chairs thrown at him. The man is a mouthpiece of an undemocratic/unrepresentative authoritarian crazy ass regime (I'm not talking about putting anyone on any axis of fill in the blank) and people are just sitting quietly and listening to this guy talk. I think a part of that silence was the upper middle class white old men and some women culture. My student comes from a culture of resistance. Make some noise. Don't just sit there. The king has no clothes. He was silver tongued. And then everyone else and I clapped for the presentation at the end of it. Absurd! Both of my students couldn't have been more tuned out and disgusted. They may not have had a lot of background knowledge but they knew enough to not just be cool with a man trying to run one on everyone.