Posted on 11/19/2009 5:32:28 AM PST by SolidWood
When she was helping her son with his homework Saturday night, a Central Bucks mother noticed something that surprised and shocked her.
"I couldn't understand what I was looking at," said the woman, whose identity the newspaper has agreed not to disclose.
It was a work sheet called "Solving Equations using Multiplication and Division!" and it featured a photo of a black man wearing a straw hat, shirt and suspenders, with his mostly toothless mouth wide open. As if to underscore the man's stupidity, at the bottom of the picture was written, "No wai!!!"
The mother learned that her son, the only black student in his eighth-grade pre-algebra class at Lenape Middle School, was teased by another student when the assignment was distributed.
"One of the kids in the classroom turned around and said, 'Is that your father?' " she said.
"We are highly insulted and offended. We sent him to school to learn pre-algebra. He should be protected from this stuff, not have it thrown in his face...He gets enough (racial slurs) and negativity from the kids. To have the teacher encourage it?"
[...]
The boy's mother said she spent much of the weekend angry and in tears.
"It's very stressful to be an African-American in the community and you want to fit in and you want to embrace all of the things Central Bucks offers you," she said. "Who's protecting us here?"
Monday night, after meeting with the boy's family, NAACP Bucks County President John Jordan issued a written statement denouncing the events.
[...]
She plans to keep her son home from school until she feels as though it's safe to send him again.
(Excerpt) Read more at phillyburbs.com ...
Yes I agree with that. The mother is also "acting stupidly".
It is possible the teacher made an error but I doubt it. The teacher should have known it was insensitive. She is a teacher, they deal with this stuff all of the time. This picture fits the stereotypical mold of an uneducated black man with poor hygiene. Add to that a facial expression pretty close to an ape and tack on a caption ridiculing black speech.
To me it's obvious, and I am not one of those racially sensitive folks but I am sensitive to the feelings of a young child.
Exactly. The "I am offended therefore there must be racism" line is wearing then and charges like this have actually diminished the words. I've been saying this for years on this very forum.
If the guy had been white with freckles, all would have been well. I am so weary of this crap that I almost don't care anymore.
I wonder if this story is really true; or the usual plant.
Agreed about PC society... Submit! :-)
There is a great deal of difference between "inappropriate" and "racist". The mother with whom you are agreeing has taken this way over the deep end. Keeping her child out of school because it isn't "safe"????? Please. Kids can be mean little things and that was also the case 40 years ago when I was in middle school.
I would say you can't know what the teacher intended. To just assume we know something about intent without any more evidence than this picture is why we end up with vague hate crime legislation.
LMAO!....your comment is great. All this sensitivity BS is way out of hand. From Gov Palin’s pic on Newsweek to this...So it’s nice to see humor. I feel like we are the equivalent to “Nero fiddling while Rome burned” BTW...I don’t believe this story. Photoshopping is way too easy and we already see the depth people/groups are willing to stoop to create problems that do not exist.
one would say crap if this was a white guy ..which is the problem here for me
How exactly does it hurt? How would this have been better if the graphic depicted a white toothless hillbilly and would it have been racist if the little black boy giggled at the graphic and asked his classmate if that was his daddy? Don't we want all children to fit in to society, regardless of their color? Why keep making a big issue out of what color they happen to be?
I couldn't agree more.
So you think it was a deliberate racial provocation?
The teacher just up and decided to use stereotypes to badger this kid?
I think it's more likely that the teacher thought absolutely nothing about race and went ahead with what was seen as a funny picture.
You could argue that she "should have" seen it coming, but that means we have to have race on our minds all the time. Isn't that what we're trying to get away from?
C’mon. That picture just makes African Americans look like bizarre fools. There’s no place for grotesque junk like that in a school. This ain’t the 1800’s.
I agree that it should no be on a worksheet (any homework). But it is not racist. And as far as insensitive goes to bad. I find the whole Congress offensive and so do many others.
Absolute agreement. Not everybody looks at the world through race-colored glasses. I don't want to live in a world where that happens.
It’s no secret there’s a BIG problem with the publishers of our public school books . They are agenda driven and rarely screened for there socialist agenda and this type of crap .
phillyburbs.com is behind the times. This happened, and was widely reported, about a month ago.
I can’t believe there is a teacher out there with such poor judgement.
That teacher acted stupidly.
Probably. However, education systems, no matter how insensitive to needs and feelings of students, are extremely sensitive to their bottom line.
If mama gets lawyered up, suddenly this becomes worth bringing to the school board's attention.
I haven't taught for 35 years, but even then, principals tended to ignore teachers and parents. I taught for 3 different principals, only one of whom payed attention and was fair to everyone. The others catered to athletes and cut corners on real school events--i.e., placement testing required to take one whole day was pushed through in one morning, making them totally invalid.
If this were my child I would be soooo angry.
Where is she located--Atlanta area?
vaudine
Well, math classes are usually sorted to the student’s ability. Not all kids are ready for Algebra in middle school
I agree. I made lots of signs and hand outs for my racially/ethnically/nationality mixed Sunday School students and would never have used an image like that. Or even an image of a white “redneck” for that matter.
I stayed away from all white or all black crowd representations just because we were a really mixed congregation.
Kind of funny, we had 3 Methodist churches in town, one predominatly African-American, one Korean, and ours which was a mix of everyone including many diplomatic families from Europe and Africa, as well as whites, Asians, African-American. Three vastly different worship services tailored to the congregations.
There are plenty of appropriate graphics the teacher could have chosen. Mom should have approached the teacher and he should have apologized to her and maybe talked to the class about it, using his faux pas as a learning experience.
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