- Caitlin Flanagan in the March issue of The Atlantic, responding to Schlosser’s published letter criticizing her loathsome article, “Cultivating Failure” in the January issue of The Atlantic.
So how would anyone get the loony idea that Flanagan thinks the school-gardens program is racist? Maybe from this passage in her original January piece:
If this patronizing agenda were promulgated in the Jim Crow South by a white man who was espousing a sharecropping curriculum for African American students, we would see it for what it is: a way of bestowing field work and low expectations on a giant population of students who might become troublesome if they actually got an education.
It still makes my pulse pound that anyone could write those words and that an editor could clear them for publication. Completely poisonous, gratuitous, and unsubstantiated by Flanagan’s truly half-assed reporting.
Yet Flanagan wrote those words.
She should stand up and own them.
And shame on The Atlantic for printing her response to Schlosser as if she has any grounds whatsoever for her who-me? cluelessness in the face of Schlosser’s charge. If you don’t want readers thinking you’re bringing race into an issue, then don’t fling “Jim Crow South” and “sharecropping” around so recklessly.
My critique of the January article — with links to the article itself — is HERE.
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UPDATE: Flanagan’s disingenuousness is made even more plain in her retort to a teacher who also wrote to The Atlantic. The teacher, Mary White, lists “biology and chemistry” among the subjects that can be taught using a garden. Flanagan’s reply — about “biology and chemistry,” mind you — begins with “Mary White speaks to the essentially vocational nature of garden classes.”
I’ll use the word again and I don’t use it lightly: loathsome.
