A Ph.D. candidate at the Oklahoma State University expressed regret that she taught Spanish to K-12 because she is white.
The story: Jessica Bridges, a Ph.D. candidate at the College of Education and Human Sciences at university, suggested that she stopped speaking Spanish in an effort to fight white supremacy. She made the remarks while speaking at Southern Connecticut State University’s Virtual Women’s and Gender Studies Conference.”
The event lasted for two days and focused on “Gender, Race, Community & Conflict: Pursuing Peace and Justice.” Presentations at the conference included “Undoing the White Settler-Colonial Gaze: Asserting Gendered, Racialized, and Radicalized Body Autonomy” and Diverging Feminisms: Engaging Transnational/Translational Activism,” among other topics.
What she said: At the beginning of her presentation, Bridges revealed that she made “anti-racism” and “white women complicity” her dissertation topic after she reportedly took a course on how to become an “anti-racist coconspirator.”
Bridges said that as a K-12 teacher in the U.S. she has been “embedded in a system that some scholars have identified as reproducing social injustice” and “complicit as a part of the educational system and as a white woman benefitting from white privilege.”
She claimed that she was not active enough in anti-racism and did not know the difference between anti-racism and non-racism.
Eventually, Bridges mentioned her Spanish, highlighting that it was “pretty good” and that she has studied it since her seventh grade and even majored in Spanish.
She explained that it was a master class on Marxism that made her an anti-racist activist. At one point, she asked her “Latinx” students about calling themselves “Hispanic” and told them it was “the colonizers’ term” and that they should avoid using it because they are not from Spain.
Eventually, she quit her job because Bridges says, she is a white woman.
She lamented that her students learned “Spanish from a white woman. I wish I could go back and tell my students not to learn power or correctness from this white woman. I would tell them to stand in their own power. White isn’t right.”
“Dismantling white supremacy in society looks like dismantling in my heart, first,” Bridges said. “It means I’m not going to teach Spanish. Accountability is ongoing because there is not end to the process.”
“Racism originates with, and is perpetuated by white people,” she proclaimed.
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Worth noting: Spanish is a Roman language that originated in Europe.
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