I came to class this week exhausted from a long week and, to be honest, dreading any kind of 2-hour lecture. Given this fact, it's saying quite a lot when I write that this was one of the best lectures I've ever experienced. I read once that an apple and a glass of water can wake you up faster than a coffee. Now, I don't know how reliable that information is, but shortly after having one of the generously-supplied apples at the beginning of class, my drowsiness was gone, I was participating, and just very emotionally attached to the material being presented.
I am of mixed descent myself, as my mother was born in India and my father is a third generation Canadian. I have experienced little racial discrimination over the years, and any that I have experienced never escalated into anything serious. I don't know if my views of racism are due to my family upbringing, past teachers, personal experience, (or likely, a combination of the 3), but I have an incredibly hard time understanding how some people can be so close-minded and heartless. I suppose it makes sense to grow up believing in what your parents believe in, be it politics, religion, or taste in films and music. But for parents to teach their children that an African is less worthy of love or praise or mercy than a Caucasian (or vice versa) is just wrong. In the past, when apartheid was a common and accepted system, this kind of thinking was much more common. However, in today's society, there has been vast improvements in the treatment of people of other races. No one should discriminate, ever, based on race - I just find it especially surprising and appalling that racism is still very much alive today.
The movie we watched in class today, A Girl Like Me, gave me shivers up my spine: The hurt in the girls' eyes as they talked about how they felt like other people saw them; the hurt in the little girls' eyes at the end of the clip when she associated herself with the doll she had just deemed "bad" based on the dark colour of its skin. It never occurred to me that this is still such a serious issue. I grew up in a mostly-white school system, in a highschool with no more than 5 black students and less than a quarter of the population being Asian. I never saw these students as inferior, and never saw them being badly treated. But the truth is, they too often ARE seen as inferior - academically, athletically, intellectually, socially, the list goes on. The truth is that they ARE being persecuted for their race, whether or not I witnessed it happening. As teachers, we must be aware that this is happening. Even though we might not see our students being persecuted, we need to look for signs that it could be happening. And even before that, we need to take steps to avoid it from happening at all.
It broke my heart the other day when I overheard a classmate of mine talking about his little 3-year-old sister talking about the dark-skinned princess in Disney's latest princess film, the Frog Princess. The 3-year-old said that the princess "wasn't a real princess, because she was black". How are we supposed to be advocating equality in our classrooms when children as young as 3 already have it in their heads that the colour of a person's skin determines their aptitude? The education system doesn't just need a change in our teaching methods, the entire world needs a cleansing of its living methods.
Although, I must agree, that advocating equality in the schools is a good place to start. One of the reasons I've wanted to become a teacher is to have a positive influence on my students, and to change at least one student's life for the better. A fuller understanding and appreciation of the world starts with acceptance, and teaching anti-racism in the classroom is the first step in that direction. If a student is wearing a racist shirt, as clever or as funny as it might seem at first glance, it is our responsibility to deal with it and to make students realize that it's not okay to judge others in this way. We need to know when it's necessary to have 'teachable moments', and be able to throw away the lesson plan of the day to teach about a much bigger lesson than math or English or biology. We need to teach the lesson of equality.
I'll close today's entry by stating that today's lesson was definitely the most engaging class so far. I laughed and I cried, and I've been talking about it ever since, even to friends who aren't in education. Racism is a serious issue today, and the more people know about it, the more we can work together to stop it.
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