Unlearn16: Class is in Session - The One Where I'm Orange...That's Not What This Book Is About

00:00:00.000 class is in session hey everybody and welcome to unlearn 16 class is in session guys today i'm

00:00:10.920 going to talk about being orange and you know what's really upsetting about this particular

00:00:14.460 story is now it's connected to the you know potato running the united states right at the moment but

00:00:21.680 has nothing to do with him just so you know um it has to do with the childhood story and the

00:00:30.000 book is about. So if you're watching this before July 1st, 2025, the book is not out yet. It is

00:00:36.340 coming out on July 1st, 2025, and you can go order it on unlearn16.com. However, if you have the book

00:00:44.800 and you've clicked on the QR code, then this podcast goes with the specific chapter you have

00:00:51.040 just read. So it's meant to be kind of like a little bit more, a little bit more of a deeper

00:00:57.420 take a little bit more of me rambling for a little while. And in this particular episode,

00:01:01.680 I'm going to eat this fudge. So as the story goes, it's actually a very interesting story.

00:01:08.520 And I want to tell you something sort of that happened, I guess, surrounding it.

00:01:13.480 Vanilla fudge. Vanilla fudge. I don't know. Maple, vanilla. How about it? Fantastic. By the way,

00:01:21.260 fudge should be soft, not hard. I don't know who's selling hard fudge, but it's wrong.

00:01:25.400 all right so when i was a kid um i had an orange snowsuit and uh speed up the story because you

00:01:36.340 guys have already read it or you're about to read it and i don't want to ruin every single thing that

00:01:40.220 i did people when i was very young i guess in that snowsuit were speaking about other kids skin color

00:01:50.340 and in my head in that moment as they were doing it the way that I rationalized or thought about it

00:01:59.580 was that okay well if they happen to be black or if they happen whatever color anybody is

00:02:06.380 in my head since I was wearing an orange snowsuit I was orange now let's not take any more from that

00:02:16.120 other than that? Because I know this is a part of the book where, you know, you could read it and

00:02:23.740 be like, oh, Joanna, oh my God, you were three. And just because you didn't have an idea of what

00:02:28.680 racial identity was doesn't mean that somebody else would have. I understand all that. And please,

00:02:33.240 I absolutely get all of those aspects. The reason why I included it is because there's an innocence

00:02:42.480 about a child. And I don't care what their background is. I don't care what their religion

00:02:47.280 is. I don't care. There is a moment. There is a time of innocence. Now, having said that, 0.99

00:02:54.620 there are some people, and specifically indigenous cultures, speak about blood memory. But I'm going

00:02:59.440 to set that aside because I don't know enough about that or to speak in a legitimate way.

00:03:05.220 I'm just going to talk about the moment where you have a family, you are loved, you are safe,

00:03:12.480 and you step into the world and you start seeing just different, you start identifying things as

00:03:17.980 differences. And then what the world does to you, whether they're doing it to you about the way that

00:03:24.020 you look and about the way you walk and your skin color and your, all of the different things that

00:03:30.580 are going to make up you, and they start judging that, or whether it is about how the world

00:03:37.540 starts to set up dynamics at a very young age about how you're supposed to look at other people.

00:03:46.140 Because every kid is going to notice difference. You want to know if you put on a couple pounds?

00:03:51.060 Ask a five-year-old. They'll tell you. They're going to notice difference.

00:03:58.440 Here's the beauty of it, though.

00:04:01.900 Noticing difference isn't judgment, isn't stereotype, isn't prejudicial.

00:04:08.880 Noticing difference is just a physical or a physiological, a sensory capacity to compare

00:04:17.960 and what looks different and what feels different and what texture is different, all of those things.

00:04:23.820 Nothing wrong with that at all.

00:04:27.560 But at what age, and I don't know the answers to this, so this is going to be one of those

00:04:33.000 ones where I'm going to talk, but understand that I don't know the answers.

00:04:38.300 I don't know how anybody can know these answers.

00:04:41.360 At what age does either subconscious prejudice or subconscious ideas and stereotypes flood

00:04:52.880 into your mindset? And at what age do you start actually listening to what people have to say,

00:04:59.240 the news, the media, your great uncle at dinner, school people? At what age do you

00:05:07.320 then are capable of listening and determining and applying the different things that you hear

00:05:16.740 in this world and the way in which you use them? Because I think the subconscious part

00:05:21.160 Happens before we're five.

00:05:25.000 Isn't that crazy?

00:05:27.360 Psychologists say that 75% of who you're going to be, of what you're going to think,

00:05:32.340 of the intrinsic, instinctual, subconscious makeup of you is formed by five.

00:05:41.800 So, for a lot of people, they don't even go to school yet.

00:05:45.800 I mean, I went to daycare, but for a lot of people, that's not the case.

00:05:48.860 So you can have very limited engagement with what's informing that feeling.

00:06:00.400 So if that's true, a lot of probably what forms our ideas are happening before we even, for the most part, step outside of our homes.

00:06:14.080 and as soon as we step outside of our homes I think you know like I did on that playground

00:06:21.540 I think that those moments have big impacts now that story my mom has told me time and time again

00:06:28.920 as every story that you know you have when you're little so I'm I have a hard time knowing if I have

00:06:34.420 any memory of it or if it's just you know recreated memory as we sit around the Thanksgiving dinner

00:06:41.400 table time and time again, or whatever. But I think of the innocence of a child. But I also,

00:06:50.180 knowing that by five, 75%, I also think of that often. I also think what gets brought in.

00:07:01.920 So me, if I was a parent, like what are my issues, my thoughts, my feelings, because that's what kids

00:07:09.180 are absorbing, right? They're really not absorbing your words. They're absorbing your feeling.

00:07:14.800 They're absorbing the tonality you use with those words. So when they absorb that, as in every house,

00:07:23.140 how is that constructing them? And I think this is all so, so incredibly important and nobody

00:07:29.060 really wants to talk about it, I don't think, because I don't know if you can control it.

00:07:34.700 and if you can't control it then as a parent you don't want to feel like you've done something

00:07:41.460 wrong like you've passed something on and not just as parents right extended family again

00:07:46.060 anywhere that that kid goes they're absorbing that's all they're doing at that age every

00:07:51.560 single place they go they're absorbing ideas they're absorbing thoughts they're absorbing

00:07:58.880 feelings. They're absorbing tone. They can tell. And this is why the words you use, you know,

00:08:05.820 when adults like spell things, it's not the words you use. It's the tone with which you use them.

00:08:12.560 It's like a puppy. And I don't mean to relegate children to animals. I'm just saying

00:08:17.140 when they don't have a vocabulary, they're not analyzing the words you use when you get angry.

00:08:23.340 they're analyzing you know it's like the swear word they might replicate it later but it's not

00:08:29.260 the swear word they're analyzing it's it's the way in which you say it it's if you're saying

00:08:34.500 it with rage if you're saying it with compassion if you're saying it with trepidation they're

00:08:39.680 feeling that so all of that gets spilled out and we live in a world if we're going to talk about

00:08:48.960 and in this chapter you could really talk about anything right you could talk about

00:08:52.680 race. You could talk about sex. You could talk about ethnicity. You could talk about religion.

00:08:57.280 We live in a world, and I know that lots of people would love to say we live in a

00:09:01.500 colorblind world. No, we don't. Stop it. Stop it. Let's stop denying it. Because the more we deny,

00:09:08.740 the more that we create this false illusion that everybody's perfectly objective,

00:09:12.300 and I don't see color, and I don't see religion, and I don't see sex. Stop it. Stop it.

00:09:19.040 as adults, kids can't control their environments. They can't control those feelings. They can't

00:09:27.180 control all that subconscious purse. As we, you know, as get put in your head, as they start

00:09:32.300 going through school, this is the interesting part. At what moment do you start talking about

00:09:39.620 it? At what moment do you put it on the table? And there's huge debates about this, and I'm not

00:09:48.040 even going to come close to telling you that i'm a psychologist that understands and but the

00:09:53.640 conversation's interesting because what we're saying is at what point could the world be putting

00:10:02.440 things on kids whereby a teacher's role should be to create and acknowledge and teach some type of

00:10:16.600 equity and inclusivity in the classroom because there's all of this incredible anger and animosity 0.67

00:10:22.360 towards things like dei in the classroom and when are you allowed to talk about you know the gay

00:10:27.720 community when you're talking about a lot of talk about trans rights when are you allowed to talk

00:10:30.760 about african-american experiences about different like when are all those things happening because

00:10:36.600 if you have kids that they're not they haven't processed any of that yet and then you put it on

00:10:42.680 the table i get some people are like well don't put it on the table so young because they still

00:10:46.520 don't know but i'm thinking they know i'm thinking they feel it i'm thinking that we never went wrong

00:10:59.240 by saying everybody should be respected included we never went wrong by sitting down and identifying

00:11:09.080 differences because differences aren't bad. Differences should be beautiful. They should be

00:11:16.200 powerful. They should be highlighted. And so if we, if we embrace it that way,

00:11:27.260 then those moments can only help encourage, empower, and strengthen all kids, right?

00:11:38.600 Now, some people are going to say, yeah, but in my culture, religion, background, I don't

00:11:44.680 care where it's stemming from, I don't like that.

00:11:47.040 Well, that's cool.

00:11:47.700 You don't have to.

00:11:49.100 You could still educate and talk to your kid however you want, but the minute you step

00:11:56.280 into, let's say, public education, I truly believe that it's our job.

00:12:01.420 it is the only reasonable method and and rational and truthful way of teaching which is i'm going

00:12:13.720 to teach about the world as it exists i'm not going to deny the existence of different people

00:12:18.260 i'm not going to marginalize i'm not going to erase because that doesn't make sense i am going

00:12:23.680 to talk about it in a amazing beautiful inclusive way without demonizing anybody without

00:12:31.020 All of those things can be true at the same time.

00:12:35.440 But if you're going to start saying, I'm opting out, like in the United States right now,

00:12:39.240 they just can opt out of, parents have the ability to have their kids opted out of reading books

00:12:46.620 that are LGBTQ characters in them.

00:12:50.680 What?

00:12:52.740 So you're saying you have to go to the extent that your kid, in a public school, by the way,

00:13:01.020 And again, if you don't like the idea of public education, if you want a more specific, directed, reflexive education, then you don't have to put your kid in public school.

00:13:12.620 You can put them in a private institution. You can homeschool them. I would never stand in the way of that.

00:13:17.800 what I stand in the way of is this. When you create a classroom and you put down a book

00:13:23.820 for all the kids to read, for all of us to discuss, for lessons to be planned around,

00:13:29.420 for learning to commence, and you have kids that can opt out, what is that saying to the other kids?

00:13:40.080 Why are they opting out? Does that mean that this particular topic is bad? Does that mean

00:13:44.280 that those people are bad? What if there's kids in that class who have, you know, two moms, two

00:13:49.160 dads, whatever? And then what do those other kids do as a teacher, as I'm teaching this book over

00:13:54.660 here? Shakespeare, for example, because, you know, we know that it is inundated with these types of

00:14:02.920 characters that are being protested all over the United States and Canada, by the way. So I'm

00:14:09.060 teaching this. As a teacher, I have 20 kids doing this. I have five kids that opt out. What are they

00:14:14.800 going to do? What are they going to do? Even as a practical problem, how am I supposed to teach to

00:14:24.900 those individuals? Do I create a whole other lesson? Do I split the class? I'm going to talk

00:14:29.800 to you about this. And when you're on, I'm talking about this particular book and we're reading it

00:14:33.360 out loud, because that's what we do with a lot of our books, please, you can earmuffs. And then I'm

00:14:38.660 going to spend half the time with you and then I'm going to switch to I'm going to teach two

00:14:41.280 different classes and what happens if out of these five kids two of them don't like the second book

00:14:45.540 I chose because it taps into something else they don't want their kids knowing about so do I have

00:14:50.260 a third book that I've chosen because the goal of something like this is for the teacher then to say 0.81

00:14:55.660 well I won't pick any books with these kind of well in this particular case LGBTQ plus characters

00:15:03.020 I won't pick any books like that because it's going to be easier and I can just teach the one

00:15:08.020 class and nobody's opting out. Nobody's challenging it. You see the problem? The point of that

00:15:15.180 legislation isn't just somebody to opt out of something. The point of that legislation is to

00:15:21.260 erase the subject from school because it's going to make it too difficult. A lot of people are

00:15:25.840 comparing it to health class, right? Forever, even when I was a kid, you were allowed or parents were

00:15:34.220 allowed for their kids to opt out of sex ed. Okay, so what do you do? You're not in the classroom

00:15:40.180 then. What? So you're going to get less education. You're not in the classroom. And by the by,

00:15:47.800 none of the kids that ever opted out, or their parents, by the way, opted them out.

00:15:55.780 None of them didn't know exactly what was going on in those classrooms. None of them didn't look

00:16:01.820 the textbooks. None of them didn't look it up. And in today's day and age, what are we doing?

00:16:09.980 What are we doing? Teenagers can look up anything they want on any phone that they have access to

00:16:20.220 at any given moment. And you think we're going to be able to legislate, control, and narrow

00:16:26.940 know, what they read and what they know and what they're exposed to.

00:16:34.920 What a waste of time. You want to start telling kids books are banned because, you know, that's

00:16:39.900 going on all over the United States. Out of the curriculum, we're not showing this, we're not

00:16:43.780 doing this. A 15-year-old is like, cool. Yesterday, that 15-year-old, you couldn't get them read two

00:16:52.660 pages of that book because they don't want to read the book. It's boring. They don't care

00:16:56.120 even if there are any characters in it. They'd rather stare at the page and pretend to read for

00:17:01.580 45 minutes rather than actually read the book. And any teacher knows that I'm telling the truth.

00:17:06.580 Go ahead and ban it, boys. Go ahead, Potato Trump. You ban it and watch those 15-year-olds.

00:17:15.360 Is it a strategy? Learn to read and enjoy reading. All of a sudden, you have all of these teenagers

00:17:20.920 going to find out all the books that you just banned

00:17:24.500 and reading like there's no tomorrow.

00:17:28.640 Go ahead, ban them.

00:17:31.540 Maybe it's like a, what's that thing when you say to do the thing

00:17:35.200 and then, you know, you say the opposite so they do the opposite?

00:17:40.140 I don't remember what that's called.

00:17:43.220 But maybe it's a psychological strategy that they're employing,

00:17:47.260 employing in order to get all these kids to read.

00:17:50.920 That would be nice. I don't think it is, but I think that might be the effect.

00:17:57.920 All these things are incredibly hard to talk about.

00:18:05.320 I mean, I teach at a very diverse school, right? Reverse psychology. I love it when I'm on here 1.00

00:18:13.320 because when I'm on here, by the way, and I'm doing this, Anna is listening to me in the other

00:18:18.520 room and she'll like just spout out what the answers are supposed to be. She's not on a more

00:18:22.260 than one podcast. Reverse psychology. Having a diverse classroom is incredibly important. 0.98

00:18:31.320 If I'm going to talk about the different, you know, lived experiences of many people,

00:18:36.320 having different people who have lived different lives are incredibly important.

00:18:42.720 I don't think shutting down conversation is ever a good idea. I don't think excluding

00:18:48.160 topics is ever a good idea. I don't think that marginalizing or demonizing questions kids have

00:18:55.240 is a good idea. Kids can ask me any question they want. Period. I'll do my best to answer it.

00:19:02.000 I will do my best to answer it in school. That's my job. Now, if it's something, you know,

00:19:09.280 personal for them and a call home needs to be made, that's a different conversation altogether.

00:19:13.460 But if a kid's going to ask me a question, and sometimes I've had classes, especially younger years, because what else you don't understand, or a lot of people don't understand, you have grade six, seven, and eights, they're listening to every single thing older kids say.

00:19:27.480 not me but every single thing older kids say so when older kids are talking about all of these

00:19:35.320 very very adult conversations or uh you know young adult themes in in war and history class

00:19:44.120 and all of these things um it matters and it affects them and they end up coming to me

00:19:51.860 right uh and and normally what happens in that case is i answer the question and then i call home

00:19:59.740 i call home and say listen your kids came in and asked this question i'm gonna answer it uh

00:20:09.260 and but just so you know this is how i answered it this is what i said you have every right to

00:20:14.820 say everything else but i will and i've said this to many parents i will not answer a question

00:20:19.480 I won't give my moral sort of control like a scope on it that's not mine to do I don't need

00:20:31.760 to tell you whether your question's bad or good I don't need to tell you whether you're right or

00:20:35.860 wrong I don't need to give any moral sort of that's not that really isn't my job I want you

00:20:40.260 to be a good person I want you to be a good person to those around you I want you to be an accepting

00:20:45.320 person. I want you to be a caring, compassionate person. And outside of that, your choices are

00:20:50.060 your choices. A job of a teacher is to make sure that they're always able and capable of answering

00:21:00.140 big questions and then keeping the doors open with parents. I do firmly believe in that.

00:21:04.720 Understand that. Understand that any parent should be able to know what's going on in their

00:21:09.800 class at any given moment. Understand that. And I'll tell you what, active parents who are a part

00:21:17.940 of their kids' lives, who are a part of their education, who take that role seriously and don't

00:21:24.260 just take the role seriously when they hear that a teacher mentioned one thing one time that they

00:21:28.100 didn't like and they don't ever want to talk about, guess what? Those parents never have a problem.

00:21:33.320 Ever. Ever. Shockingly, it's always the parents who don't come to parent-teacher night.

00:21:39.800 not because they can't, not because they're busy.

00:21:42.940 You know, there are parents who don't have the time.

00:21:45.080 I get that.

00:21:45.860 I'm saying you just make decisions, who think, oh, no, that's not.

00:21:48.700 They're fine.

00:21:49.840 They're fine.

00:21:50.740 What's going on in school today?

00:21:52.120 Are you bored?

00:21:52.820 Oh, I'm not going to look online.

00:21:54.200 I don't need to do that.

00:21:56.680 I try to make sure my courses, my lectures are fully transparent, fully.

00:22:03.180 That's important.

00:22:04.160 But what's not, what I am not going to do is censor and limit curriculum as established by the Ontario government, Ontario's case, in order to fit whatever perception or whatever life that you're choosing to lead.

00:22:23.240 lead. In a public classroom, we tell the truth. We try to tell what's the most up-to-date pieces

00:22:31.420 of information when it comes to science, when it comes to health, when it comes to history,

00:22:35.080 when it comes to all of those things, right? And if other things challenge that, cool,

00:22:40.260 we talk about them as well. But I am not going to limit truth. I am not going to limit curriculum

00:22:46.080 in order to pad and manipulate and, you know, sort of create an opaque learning situation

00:22:55.500 for our kids. I just won't do it. And a lot of this, when you're talking about this,

00:23:02.460 and it's funny, a lot of the courses I talk about as I teach, and it's been, it's not been,

00:23:07.660 it's never been easy. By the way, the conversations are never easy. Knowing how to have them,

00:23:13.320 when to have them, how to answer questions. Never, never, never easy. That's not the point.

00:23:18.720 It was easy. Here's what I promised. That kid's never answering, asking that question in the

00:23:22.320 first place. Everything is hard. Everything is nuanced. Everything has a thousand shades of gray.

00:23:28.740 That's what makes it interesting. That's what makes kids want to ask those questions.

00:23:35.980 So when I answer them, a lot of the times, and if not all of the times, I answer with,

00:23:42.120 I don't know it all. I don't know everything. And this is my perception. What do you think?

00:23:52.860 How do you feel about that? Right? How do your parents feel? I think this is something you

00:23:59.340 talk to your parents about too. Because I think we've gotten to a point in our society,

00:24:06.640 and I'm really having an issue with it, in the classroom, if you have the rise of guys like

00:24:11.360 Tate and the rise of trad wives and all of these people pushing civil rights or trying to push

00:24:16.580 civil rights back 50 years, saying, well, it's okay to joke and make fun and demean, and you 0.55

00:24:23.460 can type anything you want on the internet. And you want to tell teachers that they can't talk

00:24:29.160 about discrimination, injustice, racism, sexism, you want to tell them they can't talk about all

00:24:36.360 of that. Meanwhile, in our society today, it's all been magnified a hundred times over.

00:24:46.060 You want us to tell us we can't talk about it. That's absolute garbage. And I won't abide it. 1.00

00:24:53.040 I won't stand for it. And I know a lot of people in the United States could be losing their jobs

00:24:58.700 because of it. No. They're manufacturing ridiculous scenarios of classrooms

00:25:05.920 in order to weaponize, you know, um, in order to weaponize sort of this cultural war

00:25:17.400 in order to make some people feel terrified and protective and make other people feel like

00:25:23.200 villains, degenerates, and the enemy. And I won't do it. And anybody that's on that side of the

00:25:30.940 fence, disgusting. And they're only doing it in order to empower themselves, in order to make 0.96

00:25:35.980 themselves feel good, in order to make other, because the only way they can do that is making

00:25:40.420 other people feel small. There's no other point to it. Absolutely not. In a world where joking,

00:25:48.340 You can say I was just joking. I understand not wanting to always be politically correct. I get it. I get it. I get people getting frustrated for making errors in word choices and feeling like their language needs to be so incredibly precise that they sometimes feel you're overwhelmed. I get it. I'm 49.

00:26:10.420 I. The amount of times I've made a mistake with pronouns, for example, I can't even count anymore.

00:26:20.100 I can't even count anymore. But in no moment does my ineptitude, does my age and does my sort of

00:26:29.200 brain direction or chemistry or the way that I learned that so at no point do I say, well,

00:26:35.860 I'm not going to try to do it anymore because what a waste. And I'm going to vilify that because I

00:26:39.840 don't want to change because that's too hard for me because i'm what too stupid to learn is that it 0.93

00:26:49.440 right all of these things that have come out are just highlighting the fact that 0.91

00:26:56.800 the way we've grown up and all of the subtleties that have been shoved in our head without our

00:27:01.040 consent have really formed controlled and created a picture of the way we think the world should

00:27:07.920 look so when we get challenges that that come at those foundational realities it makes us

00:27:15.040 uncomfortable it makes us feel stupid it makes us feel less than and some people rather than

00:27:24.880 getting educated about it rather than trying to change trying to grow trying to to to expand 0.93

00:27:30.640 their awareness. They instead revert to name calling and weaponization of language in order

00:27:39.900 to demean the people that are trying to, that are making me feel less than. And it's simply

00:27:45.520 embarrassing. It truly is. And again, I would never sit here and say it's easy. There are no

00:27:53.760 easy roads to have conversations, but to assume that our language, and this is one of the biggest

00:28:01.160 things, right? I remember I was in university and I really started learning about postmodernism.

00:28:09.100 And the premise for most postmodern thinking is the fact that language is at the root of

00:28:15.580 all of our understanding. That the way in which we speak about something, the words we use,

00:28:23.200 the tonality we use, the phrasing, all of it. That is far more important than any other sort of

00:28:34.580 legal or economic or political level of equality. That none of those things happen. That, for

00:28:42.800 example, men and women can't be equal, no matter how equal under the law or equal under economic

00:28:48.200 rule or political ideology no matter how equal they are there linguistically if we keep dividing

00:28:57.600 and talking about them differently depending on what we want to say about them for example a guy

00:29:05.000 has lots and lots and lots of conquests he's the man he's the you know fantastic he's a player

00:29:12.560 whatever, whatever, whatever you want to say. And a woman who does,

00:29:18.860 I'm not going to say those words, but the level of derogatory implications would

00:29:27.880 be overwhelming, right? Same individual, same actions. Our language says they are different.

00:29:36.900 For those who are talking about, oh, facts don't care about your feelings, the facts of a man and a woman doing the exact same thing and being treated and being described and being weaponized differently, that's the reality.

00:29:55.920 And words do matter.

00:29:59.120 The way we talk about people matter.

00:30:01.920 stages of dehumanization in order to to oppress control marginalize and eventually

00:30:12.060 exterminate altogether words are the premise of that we test it out i'm going to see if i can use

00:30:18.800 this word this expression i'm going to call them this i'm going to see how people respond oh people

00:30:23.420 are on my side cool i'm going to go a little bit further i'm not a fan of censorship but don't

00:30:29.300 twist that by not understanding that that words do matter they do have power

00:30:38.420 they do have a need to be watched and discussed and debate and debated and and sometimes argued

00:30:47.380 and put to like put down a hundred percent but also understand this that's why i don't

00:30:57.540 don't support censorship. I mean, if people would just say one thing to mean one thing,

00:31:01.740 and we could censor that and take that out of the vocabulary, that might work, but then it doesn't,

00:31:05.440 right? So somebody tells me, Joanna, you can't use, you know, I really want to marginalize a

00:31:10.620 group of people. And you say, okay, you can't use word A. I'm like, okay, cool. I'm going to think 1.00

00:31:15.040 of, and they call them dog whistles, or I'm going to think of an expression or a term or a whole

00:31:21.740 other word that my community who wants to marginalize, who wants to dehumanize those

00:31:28.480 people, will all understand what I'm saying when I say it, but it's not going to breach the ever

00:31:34.100 whatever censorship boundary that people have described or defined as being violent and

00:31:39.640 Cool, I'm just going to use a different word.

00:31:45.520 During the Rwanda genocide, 1994, the Hutu would get on public radio and would say,

00:31:57.240 It is time to cut down the tall trees.

00:32:03.120 Everybody knew what that meant.

00:32:04.500 Everybody knew that that was a call to violence

00:32:11.040 Everybody knew what that call to violence should encompass

00:32:16.840 And you had men going door to door to door

00:32:21.740 And wiping these individuals out

00:32:25.740 We can't censor that kind of hatred and violence

00:32:31.560 But the fact that nobody looked at that wording, the fact that alarms weren't raised, the fact that the West just sat around and did absolutely nothing and argued about, at what point is it a genesis, right?

00:32:47.940 How many people?

00:32:49.440 What's the intent?

00:32:50.420 How do we know somebody's intent?

00:32:51.900 Listen, these are all important questions.

00:32:55.000 But when you change your phrasing, when you create these dog whistles and coded language, you can't negate its power and its ability to mobilize violence.

00:33:12.820 so again i'm not for censorship but i'm for the discussion but i'm sure as hell not for

00:33:22.420 one side controlling the whole thing saying i was just joking can't you take a joke

00:33:26.500 these are the hard questions we have to talk about and the little kids on the playground 0.97

00:33:35.500 who don't understand what the hell kind of garbage was coming out of adults mouth why that energy 0.85

00:33:41.100 why that anger why that animosity we owe them when they get to school we owe them 0.98

00:33:48.740 a safe secure environment to have big discussions ask all the questions and at the very least feel

00:33:57.460 safe in that space in doing so for who they are and who they want to be

00:34:04.320 and if you want to wear an orange snowsuit while that's happening

00:34:11.100 then wear it. Thank you guys so much for hanging out. Please go check out my book. That's not what

00:34:17.880 this book is about. It's like the five people you meet in heaven, except I don't go to the

00:34:22.100 afterlife. I become a teacher. Lessons learned. Let's see if we can learn together. Thank you

00:34:27.100 so much, guys. I will see you next time. Same bat time, same bat channel. Dismissed.

Unlearn16: Class is in Session - June 28, 2025

The One Where I'm Orange...That's Not What This Book Is About

Episode Stats

Transcript