Racism

It all started with a book I didn’t like and whose name I do not remember. Nor do I even care to look it up.

I don’t say this about a lot of books, but it was terrible.  

And I fell asleep during the movie version of it.  Even though it starred James Earl Jones.

You would think that anything with James Earl Jones would be nothing short of epic.  Well, I’m here to tell you that, unfortunately, you are mistaken.

And here’s the icing on the cake: it was a book that had been used in the past in the grade 9 curriculum.

Bad book, bad movie, had to teach it.  There’s a trifecta, if there ever was one.

Thank God I smartened up and stayed away from it the following year. That’s the beauty of being left in charge of creating a new curriculum.  

The rough part of creating a new curriculum is … well, creating a new curriculum.

Anyway, back to The Book That Shall Not Be Named.  It did serve a very valuable purpose in molding the direction in which I took the curriculum.

But first I have to tell you a little bit about the book. It was set during the Apartheid and talked about the experiences of a black man – I think he was a priest – during that time.

Apartheid was a time of very strict and regulated segregation between whites and the non-whites in South Africa, which started in the late 1940s and wasn’t fully abolished until 1992. When I teach books, context is important, and since I didn’t know much about Apartheid, I started doing some research.  Here’s what I remember:  the whites were outnumbered but in power.  They were terrified that they would lose that power if any form of democracy was set up, so they refused to give any voice to anyone who wasn’t white.  Contact between the two groups was limited, except where the non-whites worked for the whites.  And that was only the beginning.

I remember reading and getting angrier the more I learned.  It was awful.  

But I was living in China at the time, and the more I read, the more I got convicted about my attitude towards what I didn’t understand about the people that surrounded me and their ways.  And the more I realized that, inside of me, was the potential to at least adopt similar attitudes to the whites in South Africa. 

Of course, there’s no way that I could ever gain enough power over 1.3 billion people in order to oppress them.  But that doesn’t justify my attitude

What I realized was the importance of discussing racism and the potential that exists in all of us to act in racist and prejudicial ways. 

So the following year, I changed things.

The school just happened to have a class set of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird and a copy of the movie adaptation of The Power of One.  And then to bring it home to my kids a bit more, I found stories of racial incidents in China and Korea, like the Chinese girl with a black father. She ended up on a Chinese reality show and was slandered online. I also found stories about Amerasians, a term coined to describe the children – mostly in Korea – who were fathered by American soldiers who had been stationed there.  They didn't really have a place in society.

We were also able to discuss the Mukden Incident, where Japan invaded China and began committing heinus acts against the Chinese, along the same vein as those happening to the Jews in Europe. And around the same time.  We just happened to be living in Mukden (now Shenyang), where the 9,18 Historical Museum is located.  Thanks to a wonderful Chinese colleague, we were able to get a guided tour of the place. 

Our visit to the museum drove the point home for me that anyone was capable of hatred, and anyone was capable of acting out on it.  And that's what I wanted to teach my students.

Of course, somewhere in there, they were also supposed to be honing their academic skills ...

It was a powerful unit, a good time of discussion, and I learned a lot.

And it was all because of The Book That Shall Not Be Named.