Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

Yes, that's very odd, and I find it to be heavily problematic article. (I probably shouldn't teach it so early in the semester, given how problematic I find it, and I do give it with a generic "I assign these articles not because I agree with them but because I think they will spur interesting conversations". Unfortunately, at the beginning of the semester students often interpret that warning as a place where they can talk about being hurt that the essay has accused them by implication of growing up with white privilege, and it's not really the most fruitful discussion. Need to think about that.)

But to play devil's advocate and support the essay, the white American mythology of displacement is definitely one of success. In graduate school, Lissa Paul taught a class on the Canadian imagination where the core of her argument was actually that the American mythology is of success and the Canadian mythology is of failure, which I was very hostile to at the time but I'd like to go back to now as a more thoughtful person. And the mythology of "we came, we made friends, we took over" is very different from the mythology of all of the intervening waves of immigration (white and otherwise) which is one of assimilation and loss of culture.