It begins early. When her daughter was in Junior Kindergarten, Stoney Creek, Ont., mom Christabel Pinto says she would come home from school every day in tears. The kids were calling her names; they wouldn't play with her because, “brown people get diseases.”
I’d go into the basement and cry,” says Christabel, an accompanist and music director. The teacher’s response was almost worse. “She told the other kids ‘she’s just different from them,’” says Christabel, who withdrew her daughter from the school.
Kiera Silverglen, 14, of Hamilton, says she’s grown used to racist comments such as “How was the slave ship?” “How was it when you were a maid?” She copes by writing poetry and short stories (she received first place for poetry in this year’s Hamilton Public Library’s Power of the Pen – a prestigious writing contest).
Name-calling is bad enough. Far more insidious and harmful are the negative perceptions and derogatory stereotypes too often associated with people of colour.
“I was almost arrested in Walmart for looking at a DVD,” Kiera says. A salesperson came up to her and asked, “Were you going to steal that?” She had to call for her mom (who is white) to get the manager.
Kiera’s adoptive mom, Catherine Silverglen, is a teacher and anti-racism educator. Catherine shares an example of the sort of attitude her family frequently gets from teachers: “We met with the teacher because Kiera was having some challenges in a particular subject,” she says. “The teacher made a joke that went (with accent), ‘She is just a little bit slow. I don’t want to use the word lazy but I was in Jamaica once mon, and they are all so laid back, maybe it’s cultural.’” (Kiera was adopted from Chicago).
To combat negative perceptions in her classroom, Catherine introduces positive images of non-white cultural groups. “I’ll talk about the incredible histories and contributions of the African continent; Egypt, Benin, ‘the city of Gold.’ Why don’t kids learn any of this?” Too often, we only hear about these cultures in a piteous light – which is an unfair and biased view.
“I think as white people, we really need to challenge ourselves to get to know non-white people,” says Catherine. She suggests also reading a few books by authors from different cultures about their own experiences. Books like The Help and To Kill a Mockingbird are about racism in the U.S. south, for example, but they are about how a white person stood up for a black person. They shouldn’t be the only books on our reading list.
