WATCHING YOUR CHILDREN ENCOUNTER OTHER CULTURES
Sometimes you experience the world most strongly through your children. This room contains the stories our children told us, or their experiences as observed by us, of their encounter with a race or ethnic group different from their own, or with racism. |
The black kids, the poor white kids, Spanish-speaking kids, and
Asian kids in the U.S.--in the face of everything to the
contrary, they still bop and bump, shout and go
to school somehow. And dare not only to love somebody else, and
even to accept love in return, but dare to love themselves--that's
what is most amazing. --- Maya Angelou>
...when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"
from LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM JAIL April 16, 1963 Martin Luther King, Jr.
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What
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![[image map]](images/racesmap.gif)
