Sunday, November 23, 2008

Racism is alive and well

Today's Thanksgiving activity included a colouring page. Along with TG standards such as turkey and sweet potatoes (which the kids, being Japanese, coloured purple), a family was depicted on the page. Your average nice, loving, non-denominational family.

I watched the kids carefully, doing my best to elicit some English words from them. ("What's this? A turkey? YEAH GOOD JOB DUDE HIGH FIVE YOU RULE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!")

One kid grabbed a crayon out of the box and started chuckling to himself. As I glanced at his colouring page, I saw that he'd coloured the family....BROWN. The horror!

As the other kids noticed, they, too, became mired in giggliness. Once the original li'l racist noticed, he switched from a brown to a black crayon, causing the other children to go into leg-kicking paroxysms on hysteria.

Finally, in an attempt to rectify what he clearly viewed as a perversion of reality, the kid started covering up the printed family's ochre/onyx taint with a white crayon.

All this time, I had to resist using a yellow crayon on my own Thanksgiving colouring.

This is why English teachers drink.

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