- Normative Narratives
I found two similar normative narratives with the same topic as mine. In Cheryl’s post, Madison’s post and my post, we both talk about the earliest memory of noticing that other people have different colour skin than we. There are two things that I found are the same in these three posts. The first one is kids meet the first people of different races and notice the “differences”. The earliest memory may not be the first time, but the memory is the beginning for us to get known of races. The second thing is that kids are curious, but not in disrespectful way.
In my story, the first time for me to see a person with different colour skin is in grade four. He was our foreign teacher, and he was white. As I compared his skin with our yellow skin ,I noticed that his colour of skin is whiter. That is because he is different from us. In Cheryl’s post, she saw the black kid in her first day of grade three. She compared with classmates as wall, “I see the new boy in our class and notice that he has darker skin than the rest of the kids in my class.” She knows that kid was different from her. In Madison’s post, she also knows the difference, “ My mom has braided my hair before, and it doesn’t look like this. Her clothes are different from mine too. She isn’t wearing leggings and a sweater like me.” and “Her skin is different too. It is very dark.”. Three of us write the differences that we found at the first look, and just from looking we can notice the race diversity. Also, Cheryl says, “He has moved here from a country very far away.”, Madison says, “Nahla tells us that she has moved here from Nigeria.”, and my teacher was from US. People would say that people who have different colour skin are from different places. That is not correct.
In our stories, we are all curious. In my memory, I was curious about whether my teacher ever bask in the sun and whether I can be so white. For Cheryl, she say, “I am very curious hear his name and what he did this summer.”. and for Madison, she was curious about Nahla’s hair, clothes and skin. The things that we curious are the things that we thought about at first with no offence. We do not have the thought of racism. I had no idea about racism because I lived in China. In China, the majority is people have yellow skin, and had few people from different races. I see nothing is related to racism though Cheryl’s and Madison’s posts. There is no problem for kids to be curious when they first meet a person from other races without offence.
2. Creating counter-stories: Disrupting normative narratives
In Sierra’s post, she saw the difference, but she was scared. She explains that “ because I had never seen someone who was not like me, (there was no range of diversity in my school because it was so small).” It is different from Cheryl, Madison and me, but not weird. It could be frightened by the panic caused by confusion.
The thing that catch me is that she says, “All my friends told me that their parents told them never to talk to strangers and be careful of the ones that have different colour skin.” Why people need be careful with people who have different colour skin. For this situation, I think the environment could be one reason for Sierra to be scared at that time. And because of this, Sierra began to ask “Why should I stay away from people who are different than me?”. That is quite different from the question that Cheryl, Madison and me wondered. This shows that white people are alert to people of other skin colour, and people of other skin colors are excluded by white people. As Johnson&Shapiro say in book, “Whites are the racial group that lives the most racially segregated lives”(2003, p.132). For racist, they put themselves on the top and separate from other races. These racist ideas are passed down from colonial era through generations, but it will change, or it is changing.
Cited:
Sensoy, Ö, & DiAngelo, R. (2017). Is everyone really equal?: An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press