The Personal Side of Bias, Prejudice, and Oppression

The memory that I am going to share is when my daughter was in kindergarten almost 23 years ago.  It was a time when multicultural crayons were just being introduced.  My husband is from Venezuela so his skin tone is more olive, but he is still a very light skin toned Latin American.  Our daughter has dark hair, dark eyes and more olive toned skin like her father.  She was at the art table with her friend coloring and she picked up a crayon and started to color and her friend told her she could not use that one because her dad was not white.  She said, “I have seen your dad and he is not white so you can’t use that crayon”.  When I picked Jordan up that afternoon the first thing she asked me when she got in the car was what color is daddy.  I asked her why she was asking and proceeded to tell me her story. 

The feelings I had were anger, sadness, guilt, and frustration all rolled into one.  I was angry that anyone would hurt my child.  I was sad that someone hurt my child and guilty for putting her in the situation.  I was frustrated with the teacher for not stepping in to help her.

The way this situation could have been better is if the teacher would have been utilizing the teaching strategies suggested in our textbook on exploring skin color with young children.  Children are active observers of physical characteristics.  As they become familiar with some of their own features and those of their classmates, help them to have vocabulary and ideas to understand sameness and difference (Derman-Sparks & Edwards, 2010).

 

Reference

Derman-Sparks, L., & Edwards, J. O. (2010). Anti-bias education for young children and ourselves. Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC).