Beyond Blame

Beyond Blame is a thirty page, three-lesson curriculum developed by the Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC) in response to the terrorist attack of September 11,2001, intended to address any backlash against Arab-Americans. It uses the internment of Japanese in the U.S. during World War II as an object lesson in the wrongs perpetrated by using ethnicity alone to demonize and even criminalize innocent people. Marilyn Felt was the chief writer for this project, one of its three authors.

Beyond Blame was completed within a week of the attack!! It has been widely used in classrooms both in the United States and abroad.

The Beyond Blame Curriculum is provided as a PDF file.

Jennifer Davis-Kay provides a wonderful description of the development of this curriculum in Working with Marilyn on the Beyond Blame Curriculum (PDF, 60KB). She was EDC's in-house copy editor for more than a decade. Jennifer lives in Arlington with her husband and two children and is now a freelance editor and aspiring novelist.