No WAI!!!!
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 ...
well at the very LEAST it was done with some mindboggling insensitivity. Freepers are generally the LAST ones to find something racist but the consensus appears to be that is t the SLAP YOU IN THE FACE level of insensitivity.
“For every BS charge of racism and insensitivity that comes out, occasionally they get one right. This pic has no business in an Algebra sheet”.
Agree.
Sure enough, th 4th page of GOogle i mages sends you here - about 12 or so posts down. "I chose it because it said 'no way,' which is a comment my students make when I require them to show each calculation," he wrote in an e-mail. "I had no idea that I might offend anyone. I am very sorry for any distress that this has caused my students and the community."
He probably didn't intend any racist meanings. That doesn't mean they won't be found though.
WTF was this stupid picture doing on a worksheet?
It has nothing to do with algebra.
did the teacher Xerox it herself at the top of a worksheet?
Somebody needs to ask the teacher what he/she thought she was doing. It’s offensive and it is meant to offend black people. That was its purpose. And it did. Mission accomplished.
I agree with everyone who has agreed that’s racist. The pic had no place on a math paper. We say we want minorities to fit in and learn usable skills, how does this help? This is definitely Obama’s fault.
Someone in Bucks County is really really stupid...mere ignorance won’t cover this. Be interesting to see if the teacher is fired or given an adminstrative job outside the classroom.
Sorry, don't agree. A homeless guy is a homeless guy. A crack whore is a crack whore. Injecting color into it is irrelevant whether it is a mostly white school or a black school... or at least it should be unless we are going to dive deep into the prejudice of lowered expectations.
LOL...after I wrote that I knew someone was going to call me on it... ;)
hippo has inplants....must be...and...and..can eat peanuts
Well, this pic doesn’t belong in any kind of teaching material. I can’t imagine that a publisher would make an error like this - they’re very, very careful about what goes into the books and ancillary materials and they don’t want to offend anyone. This is awful and I’d love to see who produced it.
Now, having said that, I doubt that the students were being intentionally racist. This woman should calm down and teach her son that his feelings will sometimes be hurt and there may not always be someone there to “protect” him.
Best question. It’s not racist.
Exactly.
The only racism here is people seeing this and only seeing a black man and not seeing that such a person actually exists.
It is a picture of a real person.
That person can be any color.
And if it had been the same picture with a white man, some kid would have turned to another white kid and said the same thing, "Is that your Father?"
It is nothing more than a picture of, "Don't let this happen to you."
Political Correctness is nothing more than a grievance looking for a place to whine.
The teacher was trying to be cute by posting a common internet meme. We’ve all seen it, even here on FR.
Having said that, she should have been aware of the issues it would raise, considering the mix of students in her class. Racist? I say not by intent. She’s probably at worst guilty of being a shallow loon.
No WAI!!!!
No - the offensiveness is not in the race but in the mockery. It's just trashy and had no business in algebra (or any other) class.
That said, the mother's an idiot. "Who's protecting us?" From WHAT - getting your feelie-weelies hurt? It's a mean old world, sister, get used to it. Not sending him to school until it's 'safe'? Again, from WHAT?
Well said.
That teacher/school was stuck on stupid.
Is that your father, whitie!
ROTFLMWAO!
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