Can't We All Just Get Along?

When I was a child I grew up in a world where, not only was everyone white, but many of them were my cousins. It was a very small town. However, I knew people of different races, I saw people of different races when we went to other towns, and of course I watched t.v. and saw a variety of people.

Today in my class--where I am the sole blonde/blue-eyed person---I showed them some photos of my trip to Morocco. Included in this were pictures of the taxi-man's son and nephew. When their sweet little faces came up on the screen (I used a CD in my computer and an LCD projector) a voice in my room called out, "They're white!" (They have black hair, olive skin and dark brown eyes.) These boys are in fact Berber children--whose ethnic origins I'm not quite sure of, although they are not Arabic. Hence: berber: barbarians--a moniker the local people of the area now called Morocco were given by the invading Arabs many centuries ago. But I digress...

My thought was when I heard that remark was, "Huh?" I mean why do these kids of mine ALWAYS point out the race of someone? There was an ugly slur delivered against a hispanic boy by a black student today because he was boiling mad about losing at marbles. Ironically, the hispanic boy has been a great buddy of the black kid for months and they frequently choose each other as partners in class. Whenever things get tense, racial remarks are ALWAYS used by my students. No one can ever be upset about the normal things of kid life in my class without the racial remarks being muttered, shouted, or whined.

When Archie Bunker first came to television I was a teenager. Most of the rude/colloquial terms he used when referring to people of other-than-his group I had never heard before. I'm confident my parents had opinions and prejudices but we didn't hear about it from their lips.

So what is wrong with these parents of my students that their nine year children are so conversant with the absolute worst part of American society---sterotyping with ugly racial comments??