I had more to comment on, regarding Avatar and the trends surrounding it. But then came one of those moments that throws you to make you think.
In the middle of a conversation a person being black comes up. I don’t even remember what I was saying, just that my 5 year old daughter sudden shoots me a horrified look. “I’m not black am I, Mommy?” She asks.
“No, you’re not.” Then I have to ask, because her reaction really bothers me. “But if you were why would that be a bad thing?”
“Because if I was black I couldn’t ride on the bus!”
Now, she has been bringing home the first hints of Black History Month activities (a Connect the Dots worksheet of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, which in a way is darkly ironic because of how many people in the past and present fail to “connect the dots” about the man and his message.) We talked about Martin Luther King, Jr last night and I said he was a great man, a real super hero who stood up for people who needed it, and for what was right, even though a lot of people got really angry at him for it. She said “And they shot him.”
Yes, but she didn’t get the standing up for equality and human courtesy and decency. She understood he was famous because he got shot. And today’s conversation clearly reflected Rosa Parks’s entry into the discussion. So I can tell the school is teaching my child Black History except all that she’s absorbed is no idea of what black is, and the idea that black is bad.
How can this be good for racial relations?
