Entry 8: Bless, Address, and/or Press

Bless

The blog that I chose to focus on this week was Cassidy Nelson's. I really enjoyed her blog because it was easy to scroll through and read every post without having to choose "see more". Also, I love the purple and lavender colors so it appeals to me that way as well. I really enjoy reading Cassidy's blogs because she puts a lot of thought and intention into her posts. You can tell that she's spent much time analyzing the texts, analyzing the blog prompts, and analyzing herself. Her work ethic and dedication that I see in person perfectly translates over to her written work within her blog. She puts so much intention and passion into her responses that I feel I have her writer's voice memorized by now and could easily tell it apart from others. Simply put, she is in her own lane and she is KILLING it!

Address 

Referencing to her Entry 4 blog, I'd like to know if, since responding to that prompt in February, she has come up with any ideas to incorporate stories of Black excellence and Black history into her future lessons. I agree with Cassidy's first quote of Muhammad being inspirational. 

"In fact, we too often see "diversity" or "multicultural" classes as isolated efforts rather than grounding entire programs in intersectionality as we see in black and cultural studies programs." (Muhammad, 2020, p. 40)

Gholdy Muhammad

I heavily agree with Cassidy that there are a lot of schools that "pride themselves in being 'diverse' solely on the fact that they have students who attend their school who identify as Black, Brown, or Latinx." There is so much more to diversity than just different students in a school. It is, as Cassidy referenced about the emphasis in Muhammads work, "...curriculum and instruction that should always be immersed with multimodal texts written by underrepresented authors and stories of Black excellence rather than struggle." 

Diversity is the students, the texts and other materials offered to them, the environment, and so much more. I also loved that Cassidy pointed out how these texts from underrepresented (often minority) authors should be included in all of the other sections of libraries, as well, instead of their own section. It's great that libraries want to draw focus to these authors and texts but the "Black Girl Magic" section is, in fact, segregation. Inclusivity means putting these authors on the same shelves as all of the other ones because they are equal and deserving of that.

Press

In my opinion, Cassidy did a great job at making her stance, feelings, and thoughts strong and clear to the reader. I don't have anything to further inquire about aside from wanting to know if she's found some underrepresented authors that she enjoys; I'd love to read those texts as well and could use some suggestions.