Prejudice Reduction

I broke a toe recently. Woke from a deep sleep, ambled around my apartment for just a few moments and then thump! I hit my foot on a piece of furniture. 

As I hobbled around in the days that followed, lost in the effort of just getting about, I thought “this is what it must feel like to be old.” And then—“this is what it feels like to have a disability.” 

While working on a project for class, a student of mine casually mentioned the names of some of my relatives. When I looked up in horror, he rattled off all of the towns in which I had ever lived. I was shaken. How did he get all this information about me? Simple. He had an app for that.

Each spring, at the start of baseball season, fourth-graders at my school connect with Shorty, a character from Ken Mochizuki’s book Baseball Saved Us. Shorty’s a Japanese-American child who plays baseball on a makeshift field in an internment camp during World War II. Mochizuki’s consummate read-aloud story encourages a fired-up discussion in the library. Students talk about the inequities and intolerances foisted on kids and adults alike. It’s the kind of lesson that I thoroughly enjoy teaching, year after year.

This news story out of Duluth, Ga. yesterday caught our attention. It spotlights a homework assignment given to third-graders at a Gwinnett County elementary school. One of the stories the students were expected to read bore the title What is an Illegal Alien?

“Illegal alien” is, of course, the pejorative term that immigration opponents use to stigmatize undocumented immigrants. That was bad enough in a class assignment for third graders.