Rasha Almaqaleh
With the escalating police brutality towards black people in the United States, one cannot help but wondering what is going on with the world? Are we supposed to completely lose confidence in humanity? I’m in utter shock and I don’t understand how such accustomed racism still exists in Today’s world! Actually, such hideous racial incidents remind me of the racial segregation which took place many years ago in South Africa though in the U.S. it’s not enforced through legislation but through practices.
I believe that our world today might be suffering, more than any time before, from piling prejudices, stereotypes and hatred. Nowadays, modern media outlets play a major role in the process of stereotyping people, causing serious ramifications such as hatred which stems from fear. As a dreaming mother, who desperately wants her child to live in a better world, I keep asking myself: is there anything we can do to mitigate such evil influences?
I remember the other day when my six year-old child was asking me about the black cashier in the supermarket and wondering about his color and why it’s different from ours. Frankly speaking, I was a bit puzzled by his question as I always thought that the best way to raise a non-racist child is to never point at peoples’ different skin colors. I assumed that this way he would spontaneously grow up to be ‘colorblind’ and hardly recognize skin-color differences. Well, I was definitely wrong!
Therefore, I decided to do the exact opposite which is acknowledging those differences. Therefore, in one of the daily coloring activities with my son, I started coloring the face of one of the figures in the coloring book with the dark brown color. My child looked at me and shockingly asked: “Mom, what are you doing? You are supposed to color the faces with this color as we always do!” He pointed at a light skin coloring pencil we normally use to color faces, hands and legs. I said to him: “Yes but we were wrong because people do not come in one color; there are dark skinned people like the cashier you saw in the supermarket. And there are people whose color is medium like us and there are light skinned people like many people we see around us.” (Since we live in Northern Germany). I told him that some people have blonde hair while others have black hair. But colors don’t really matter. What truly matters is what we do and how good we are to each other. He listened to me carefully, and then he picked a dark brown pencil and started coloring! Yes, whoever said children learn by example was absolutely right.
Ever since that day, we color the faces with many different colors. The good thing about the coloring books is that they have different figures with different careers; some of them are sport players, some are farmers, and some are police officers or doctors. We color the skin of those figures irrespective of their profession. For example, if there are two farmers, we color one of them with light color and the other with dark. I believe that this way my child can learn from an early age that people are equal and their color is not of any importance and this surely will help in eliminating the forming of stereotypes in his imagination.
On the whole, ignoring the different skin colors is not going to solve the increasing racial troubles of our world. We have to talk positively and openly with our children about such differences; otherwise someone else out there will take the lead and teach them that colors matter. And this will leave them with feelings of either superiority or inferiority. This is my sincere message to all parents in the different parts of our world.
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