Karen Salazar (center) with her student supporters

Open Letter in Support of Los Angeles High School Educator- Karen Salazar -for Teaching Truth and Critical Thinking to Black & Latino Youth

From: Black New Yorkers for Educational Excellence (BNYEE)

June 19, 2008

Ms. Karen Salazar
And Students of Jordan High School
2265 E. 103rd St.
Los Angeles, California
90002

Dear Ms. Salazar:

Our organization, Black New Yorkers for Educational Excellence (BNYEE), sends you and your students our support and admiration.

You are EVERY TEACHER whose goal is to liberate and free the minds of students. And your charges are EVERY STUDENT who is hungry for a relevant curriculum which is truthful about the origins of humanity and which celebrates the people and cultures whose achievements have made civilization possible.

You are every teacher who is at risk for teaching the truth about African, Hispanic and Asian peoples who sweat blood in the building of the United States, but whose stories have been told untruthfully, marginalized or omitted entirely.

The very ground that Jordan High School stands on was once part of Mexico but was annexed illegally. Alas, illegal annexation could describe the “settling” of this entire continent. Just ask those very very few surviving descendents of the native peoples. Or ask the indigenous peoples of Alaska and Hawaii, for that matter.

It is ironic and cynical that you have been reprimanded for teaching from an excerpt of the life of Malcolm X, when the biography from which the excerpt was taken is approved by the Los Angeles Unified School District. Is it also subversive that the picture of Malcolm X appears on US postage stamps? At the time of Brother Malcolm’s assassination, he was crystallizing for us the importance that beyond “civil rights”, we have more fundamental “human rights”. BNYEE recognizes that all of our children have the human right to truthful, liberatory education.

Your students are heroically defiant in demanding that your contract be renewed so that you may continue to help them discover the truth about their heritage and about the United States of America.

BNYEE hopes that the example of your courage and that of your students at Jordan High School will ignite a national movement for a truthful, antiracist curriculum in the schools of the United States. Know that we are with you. We are striving to ignite a similar curricular revolution in New York City.

In Solidarity,
BNYEE Coordinating Committee

CC: Monica Garcia, President, the LAUSD Board of Education
Roy Romer, Superintendent of Schools
Stephen Strachan, Principal, Jordan High School

LAUSD Board of Education:
333 South Beaudry St, 24th Fl.
Los Angeles, Ca., 90017
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If you need more info on this Struggle, please check out these two videos:



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