Response to Morgan Ames' Letter, author of "The Charisma Machine"

July 6th 2021

Signed: Elizabeth Bianconcini de Almeida (Brazil), Cecilia Baranauskas (Brazil), Scheila Martins (Brazil/US), Claudia Urrea (Colombia/US), Marcus Maltempi (Brazil), Elizabeth Almeida (Brazil), Eleonora Saxe (Costa Rica), Fernando Almeida (Brazil), José Armando Valente (Brazil).

We are from a group of diverse scholars from Latin America that signed and participated in the movement that resulted in the writing of the letter about “The Charisma Machine” book by Morgan Ames, published by MIT Press.

We collectively decided to write the letter because of the many injustices and inaccuracies in the book, the cherry-picking of data, the lack of citations for the extensive literature on the topic coming from Latin America, the lack of understanding of the historicity of educational reform in the continent, problems regarding methodology, and the fact that the author of the book ignored Latin America in her book talks (ten in Europe/US, zero in Latin America), book endorsements, and press interviews. An MIT Press book written by a Berkeley scholar holds enormous power, which should be considered with care especially if the data comes from the Global South. It can (and did) harm local people’s careers, projects, and reputations.

Unfortunately, instead of recognizing those issues, the author doubles down in her response to our letter on 30/June/2021, where she falsely claims that the 25 academic references we pointed out (out of tens of others) are “unrelated to OLPC.” Not only are they very much related (15 of them even in their titles), but we even listed a 150-page research book literally called “XO in Schools” edited in 2012 by Cecília Baranauskas, Maria Cecília Martins, and Rosangela de Assis. For a second time, “The Charisma Machine” decides to ignore local literature.

One of the signers of our original letter is a Latinx scholar from Brazil, Paulo Blikstein, from Columbia University (US). He also posted the letter on his personal social media accounts, just like many of us did. Unfortunately, Morgan Ames has claimed that the letter “originated” from him, and that he is a “white man tenured at an Ivy League University.”

First, he is one individual in a much larger group. We have made that very clear many times. Second, Ames’s attempt to portray him as a “white man” – intentionally invisibilizing the fact that he is an immigrant Latinx scholar from Brazil – is problematic on so many levels that we will leave it for the reader to conjecture about her reasons. Why omit from the description only and exactly the fact that he is a Latin American immigrant scholar? Doing this in the context of responding to scholarly criticism about the book’s lack of understanding of diversity in Latin America is profoundly revealing.

In addition, five individual Latin American scholars (three female, two male) wrote and signed their own personal letters and posted them on the same website. Other four scholars submitted their own list of references, and they are individually named on the website. Are those also invalid, per Ames? She claims that she would like to hear from "others," but other have already written separate signed statements!

By centering her critique on a personal attack to one person in our group, and misrepresenting his identity as an immigrant scholar from Latin America, Ames shows, again, that she believes that Latin American scholars cannot think by themselves and don’t have any agency. That is exactly our critique of the book.

The fact that she takes advantage of important equity agendas to respond to criticism is beyond our understanding and just unfortunate. It actually confirms what we have felt in many places in academia: nondominant scholars, including from Latin America, are tolerated as long as they are docile, and do not disagree--or stay invisible.

But we are good students of history and we reject that notion. We reject being made invisible. We hope Ames’s course of action will not be to personally attack individuals in our group or try to misrepresent their identity, again. We are a group and we act collectively--maybe that is something that is just part of our culture: if you disagree with our position, please address us as a group.