Wee Tiny Racism

I'm telling this story not to incite further debate on the state of racism today, but rather to illustrate the lengths to which we must go to combat our natural tendencies toward segregation.

One of my assignments this semester was to find or write an anti-bias lesson plan and analyze its merits and weaknesses. Anti-bias education calls for lessons and materials that are fully integrated. It is very different than the "tourist multi-culturalism" most schools use--the heroes and holidays school of diversity. It requires representation that is either completely neutral or completely inclusive of all races and differences. I chose to examine and rewrite a lesson called, "What Makes People Different Colors?" I practiced the lesson with The Princess last week. He was totally into it.

We talked about skin while looking at pictures of colored skin. He observed that all skin has a color, and that "white" skin isn't white like paper, and that "black" skin is really brown. I told him about melanin and he was able to identify the people with more or less melanin. We then mixed corn meal, cocoa, and red Kool Aid into skin color "recipes" and matched photos to the resulting concoctions. When I asked him to make a collage with the photos we had been using, he selected only white people. I questioned this decision and he replied, "Well, I just don't like brown people."

Whoa, whoa, whoa--WHAT?! His two best friends are brown. Mexican American and Cuban, Mexican, and Japanese. His kindergarten class is only 30% white. This is not a kid who has been insulated from racial differences.

I calmly asked him why he does not like brown people. He readily replied, "They're just not pretty, like the princesses." And there it was. Simple as that. He is obsessed with Disney princesses, but before blaming Disney for all the world's racism, I perused his bookshelf. Out of hundreds of books, only three feature people of color. Two are about Native Americans and were purchased while vacationing in South Dakota (speaking of tourist multiculuralism!). The other is Follow the Drinking Gourd. The meta message he gets from this is that white is the norm, and therefore, better.

A few days later, The Princess asked his dad, "Daddy, is it okay if I invite a brown person over for a playdate?" His dad was very upset by this question. Up until that moment, he hadn't even noticed that The Princess only invited white people over (excepting his two best friends, whom he has known from infancy). He thought they were doing everything they could to give him an integrated life experience. But they didn't consider the media he consumes.

What we don't teach children is just as important as what we do teach. I realized in practicing my lesson plan that one day of multi-cultural education cannot undo a five-year hidden curriculum of white dominance. Parents, caregivers, and especially teachers must be deliberate in our efforts to represent all races and people as equally normal.

Part 1: Wee Tiny Environmentalism

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