Your 7 year old child who is white hesitates to shake someone’s hand who is African-American. Your first grader tells another student she’s “a lesbian with her sister.” You were there. You weren’t there. You are the most open, anti-racist, multicultural person you know. Where did your child get this from? I’ve seen stories about…
I was reading a bedtime story to my 8 year old son Dillon and his 8 year old cousin Noah last night. It was a benign story, geared to a younger audience, but the boys had asked me to read it as a simple ploy to stay up later. We got to the page where…
According to psychologytoday.com, a mid-life crisis can hit around age 40, plus or minus 20 years, and can include “questioning decisions made years earlier and the meaning of life.” However, in the words of English novelist George Eliot (aka Mary Anne Evans), “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” As…
Okay, now I’ve said it, so what’s next? Traditional diversity trainings and rules of political correctness dictate you should suppress that instinct to notice race or be declared a racist. The fact is that categorization is an innate survival response dating back to the era of the hunter/gatherer: Edible, non-edible? Male-female? Friend-foe? Rather than suppress…
You know it’s difficult to talk about intercultural and interracial issues when you avoid talking even to yourself, in private, for fear of being offensive. Certainly I jest, but only sort of. There’s a couple of things I’ve noticed over the past nearly two weeks, and I have a couple of solutions to start. 1. …