Two truths and one lie. That’s how Mix It Up at Lunch Day began at Fordson High School in Dearborn, Mich. Students sat down to lunch with people who were not in their usual social circle. As an icebreaker, students played a game in which one person told two truths and one lie: the rest of the group had to guess which statement was false.
When I teach lessons about Martin Luther King Jr., I always wonder exactly how students will connect with the events and themes. My adult students are refugees and immigrants from different cultural backgrounds. Some of them were cultural minorities in their countries. Others are experiencing racial discrimination for the first time in the United States.
In 1965, James Baldwin and William F. Buckley debated the American Dream’s effect on the America Negro. The debate took place at Cambridge University, and the spectating student body proclaimed Baldwin the winner by a landslide—164 to 44.
As protesters across the nation rise up against police violence and systemic racism in support of Black lives, there’s something white allies need to recognize.
It used to be thought that college was where you went to open your mind, explore ideas and, in the words of Robert Maynard Hutchins, former president of the University of Chicago, “be freed from the prison-house of … class, race, time, place [and] background.”