PERSONAL SIDE OF BIAS, PREJUDICE & OPPRESSION

Several years ago I taught an African American female student who was removed from her home and placed with an aunt when her Mom become incarcerated. I will call her Ann. Ann had transferred to my school the year before as a first grader with about three weeks remaining in the school year. She had to repeat the first grade because of her averages from the previous school and I got her in my class for her second year of first grade. She didn’t always have the best of clothes and sometimes her hair wouldn’t be combed. On the days when this happened I or the nurse would help her with her hair and the nurse would always fix her clothing or give her something else to wear. She was very “street smart” but occasionally had a hard time getting along with the other students. This same year I have had a female Caucasian student who was experiencing her first year in a public school. I will call her Dawn. Dawn, like a few other students in my class, was a little apprehensive about being in a new school with new people. We spent the first few weeks’ role-playing and playing games about friends to help build an atmosphere of community in the classroom. Throughout the year, Ann received counseling and had visits from the Department of Social Services to see how she was getting along and to help her make an adjustment to her new surroundings at home and school. I eventually found out that she had been getting into trouble at home with her Aunt and that she was being treated differently than the other children in the home. Ann became a very angry and confused little girl. Sometimes the students would complain about her bothering them or being mean. We would discuss the problem between the students that were involved and we would work on building friendship strategies during our community meeting each morning as a class. Several times I met with the Ann’s Aunt, along with the guidance counselor, to try and find the best way to help Ann become a positive part of our room. Towards the end of the year, Dawn’s Mother informed me that Ann had made threatening remarks to Dawn several times during the year. I knew that Ann would try and take things away from children on the playground and that she would tell kids that they were not her friends, but I never knew that she had threatened to physically harm a student. Apparently Dawn didn’t tell her Mom until almost the end of the school year. I eventually found out from Ann that she didn’t like it whenever Dawn’s Mother would come and eat lunch with her, whenever she would go on a field trip with her, or whenever she would bring toys for show and tell. When I asked Ann why she acted that way towards Dawn (since other parents did the same thing as Dawn’s Mother as volunteers in my class) she replied to me that she didn’t like Dawn because she was a pretty white girl that had everything. At that moment I knew that I had failed Ann, Dawn, and their families. Somehow I had failed to nurture love between these two students and give each of them what they needed to support their emotional and social development. Ann was a victim of prejudice and the bias opinion that you have to be white in order to be pretty and have financial stability. She was also a victim of oppression because of her situation of being out of her own home, without her own mother, and being placed with family members who treated her differently than the other children in the family, and feeling inadequate in her own skin. Dawn was a victim of prejudice because she was viewed as the enemy just because of her race and her parents’ financial means. Neither one of these students received an equitable year of emotional or social development. When I spoke with Dawn she told me that there were several times when she did not feel safe at school because she didn’t know if Ann would try and hurt her. It took me a long time to forgive myself for not realizing that these two students needed me to provide them with the safeness and security of love that they needed while at school. I thought that what I was already doing in terms of building social skills, character skills, and friendship was enough. I learned from this incident that it is vital to teach, model, and re-teach positive self-awareness to children explicitly! Children must be aware of their individuality and how unique and special they are just the way they are. They do not need to change or look like others in order to be happy and fulfilled. It is also important to respect others who are different than we are. I also learned that children might bring with them preconceived biases/prejudices from their home life that can cause negative behavior and attitudes which can affect their entire view of society.