According to the text, what was the best characteristic that a student at the narrators school could bring to a class discussion
? A: objectivity
B: identity
C: too angry too weepy too irrational
D: too genteel
We practiced this “objectivity” in our current events class. It was never explicitly tied to identity but it was implied. I learned that the best person to talk about wealth and class was an upper middle class person because she supposedly could look at it dispassionately. The best person to talk about race was a white person, for the same reasons. The best person to talk about gender was a boy. When people affected by issues spoke for themselves they “got too angry, too weepy, too irrational”. In the mid-1990s, the biggest threat to America continued to be welfare queen. Or at least that’s what the news and many politicians all said. My school was far “too genteel” to name the welfare queen outright, but she haunted our balanced class discussions.
