Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Not My Thing: How We Teach Cruelty to Cure It, from the Armband to the Diversity Seminar

Not My Thing: How We Teach Cruelty to Cure It, from the Armband to the Diversity Seminar

Boles, David

Paperback

General Sociology

ISBN13: 9798182315418
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 19 2026
Pages: 418
Weight: 1.06
Height: 0.93 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English

In the spring of 1973, a teacher in a Lincoln, Nebraska classroom handed an eight-year-old boy a blue armband marked S, for slave, and set the brown-eyed children over him for the day. The next morning the roles reversed. No one in that room was Black. The lesson, the teacher said, was empathy.

Not My Thing is the case against that lesson and the whole family of exercises bred from it: the eye-color demonstration, the privilege walk, the poverty simulation, the mock slave auction, the scared-straight tour, the Gestapo role-play, the mandatory diversity seminar. David Boles argues that these rituals, however different their politics, run on a single machine. Caste assigned by accident. An authority no one may refuse. Cruelty licensed from the front of the room. An audience for whom the humiliation is performed. A reversal that exposes the whole thing as a performance the authority could switch off. It is the method of the oppressor, and it trains submission to cruelty whatever cause it claims to serve.

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