Sunday, February 8, 2009

school buses and little kids

have i mentioned how much i hate racism? how much i despise our racist society with its' ingrained and deep-seated habits and racial profiling? with its' prevalence of reverse racism? - which just proves again that we're a white supremacist culture because even the term "racism" normalizes whiteness. this time i hate racism because of the hate inculcated by parents in their young children. our only hope for salvation would be to teach tolerance and extend the social networks of our children to include children of other races, let alone other cultures, classes, sexes, gender norms and sexualities, politics...
instead of equality, however, we teach superiority. instead of providing tools to our children for those times that they will encounter racism, or sexism or ageism or classism or ..., we teach them to build walls and separations. when we are caught in the public view with our less than tolerant ways - or our children make us look less than tolerant - we either take up the beleaguerd battle cry of reverse racism or smile tightly and take our kids home and skin them alive, reminding them what racists surround us and to keep the family's racism under wraps. what lasting impressions we leave.

and just for the record, my white daughter enjoyed all people until the African-American kids on her first grade bus pulled her hair and called her "white" and refused to sit with her because of her color. and once she got over that, it was a black girl who told my daughter that she would whip her, and not mind if my daughter was killed, since our white ancestors had whipped and killed her black ancestors anyway.

racism is a two-way street, people. we cannot overcome it by continuing to hate.

3 comments:

  1. So true, mama. The saddest thing about racism is that it's a learned behavior and preventable in most cases. If ALL parents took it upon themselves to expose their children to other "cultures" and show them an example of respect for other "cultures", while teaching them that skin color tells you next to nothing about what's inside someone, then racism would be very rare and totally unaccepted by nearly all people within one or two generations. Then the media would stop perpetuating stereotypes, children would stop being influenced by them and people would be free to be who they are and love and judge each other for what they really are inside. It's so sad that this hate still exists, on both sides.

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  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  3. I know we had talked about this and I am totally in agreement with you.

    I mean if people want to make it a race blame I am sure all of us at some point could find that we were oppressed in our history. Does dwelling on it make a difference? I really don't think so....

    P.S. I had deleted the comment before because I had a spelling oops.

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