a story about a time i did one of those “simulated prejudice” exercises with kids and kids were AWESOME
i haven’t watched the video yet! i will but man, videos on computers are hard for me? but i will. but first a story because it is about one of my secret hall of fame kids — this girl who was so smart and some way of saying “well-spoken” that isn’t incredibly condescending but i mean she was an eighth grader who could probably talk circles around a lot of college kids i’ve known and wise beyond her years, for sure, and also just a lot of fun. she was in the saturday service learning program i volunteered with my first americorps year.
i volunteered to co-lead one of their groups, but we had no input in their lesson planning, etc., which i mention because man, i don’t know that if i had seen a requirement [rant on americorps service requirements redacted] that my team conduct a lesson about racism, the angle i would have gone with was “we need to teach black and latino youth in harlem what it feels like to be discriminated against.” to me this was kind of a pedagogical error, to put it nicely, and it was also really uncomfortable to be suddenly thrust into our role as people discriminating against — oh, we couldn’t do blue eyes, because NONE OF OUR KIDS HAD BLUE EYES, because they were pretty much all black or non-white hispanic (not that people in those groups NEVER have blue eyes, but it’s rare and didn’t happen in our batch). so we had them taste some chemical strip that only some people have the genetic make-up to detect a bitter taste on, and divided them that way while we read made-up facts about bitter-tasters did life-goal exercises and were supposed to discriminate against the bitter-tasters, which, i mean, i think i did a couple mean facial expression and sad head-shakes and couldn’t muster up anything else.
not that i really needed to, because here’s were the AWESOME kicked in: this girl happened to be a bitter-taster, and she gathered all the other bitter-tasters around her and explained that she had a plan: ignore the non-tasters. just ignore them. she was like, they’re going to be mean and they’re going to try to get you down but we can’t get mad, okay? we just have to be so calm and patient that they have NOTHING to get us for. and these stickers they’re making us wear to identify ourselves, here’s a pen — write PROUD on it. we’re bitter tasters and PROUD. don’t argue with them, they’re not going to back down, but we know they’re wrong about us, right? it’s not fair but we have to prove it.
and, i mean, they all listened, too. these kids have never been better behaved than they were that day. the people in charge were kind of like “um what is going on this is not what we envisioned???” and when we FINALLY explained what was going on and debriefed and most of their questions were sort of moot the bitter-tasters pointed at this girl and she explained what she’d done and why she’d done it and how as soon as the exercise had started she had started thinking about the civil rights movement and sit-ins and the ways they had accomplished things and i almost started crying. it wound up, if you ask me, a WAY BETTER LESSON for everyone involved (adults included) than it possibly could have been just left to the adults in question (and again, i don’t think we should have done this — in other groups kids had to be taken out crying, i am not really down with that happening in the type of program this was, or at least not for this reason. but silver linings).
ugh do you see? kids! she was 13! kids are the BEST!
