Summary Of Sherry Marx White Behavior Mentality

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While reading Sherry Marx’s book I came across many examples of “white savior mentality” thoughts and deficit thinking that the tutors expressed. Teachers are being pushed more and more by society to be role models for children. This is demonstrated through movies and the media quite a bit. Hollywood skews these real life stories that are made into movies to make the white teachers and other white people as the “superior, white savior”. Teachers have also been pressed to share their role model skills with parents of color, who some say don’t know how to be role models for their children. This is an example of a white savior mentality that is being ingrained into teachers’ minds. In the book, one of the tutors named Rachel showed a great example of this mentality. She proclaimed “I want to really make a difference in children’s lives. I would like for kids to be able to see me as a role model, especially in an environment where they may not have anyone to look up too.” Many of the tutors felt this way and believed that…show more content…
The deficit thoughts that the aspiring teachers was reflected through differences in culture, language, families, fear, and intelligence. Most of the tutors associated people of color, especially men, with fear. After Marx had talked with them over culture, language, and families the talk of fear came up in conversation. Becky expressed the most over the topic. She gave great examples of this deficit thinking without even knowing it. She spoke about not feeling comfortable to work in certain schools because they were not “safe”. Schools she did assume “safe” were schools like she grew up in as a child. She stated people of color were always deemed as “scary” even though she claimed that she was not intimidated by the race of

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