[John-K30509]

I want to know what people think of the current situation in which a white teacher in New York was highly criticized for teaching with a book called Nappy Hair, written by a black author and designed to celebrate differences. The teacher was using the book in order to take the culture of her black students into account.
Original Code R537. Click here to see responses from the original archives. Click "to respond" below to reply.

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Name : John-K30509, Gender : M, Race : White/Caucasian, Age : 25, City : Cranford, State : NJ Country : United States, 

[Colette]

To Lori (Original Archives): I would like to rebut your post on three counts. First, the class in question was not majority white, it was 90 percent black, and the teacher was making an effort to find something the children would identify with and enjoy. Second, as to 'African Americans might find it difficult to hear a white person read the text,' it was not the children or the parents in general who objected. One person photocopied portions of the book out of context and sent it around the neighborhood for the express purpose of creating an angry mob. Some people (of all colors) get a sense of pride from protesting, whether their protest is legitimate or not, and take offense at every opportunity without bothering to investigate the facts. Third, I take issue with your assertion that, because of racial politics, white people should tiptoe around black people. Why? For fear of setting them off? It isn't a matter of sensitivity, it's just a matter of institutionalized fear of being accused of racism. The idea that saying the wrong thing will set off this sort of explosion and riot is detrimental to any real understanding, and insulting to the reasonable, mature, majority of black people who don't run around screaming racism and shouting threats every time they hear something they don't like.

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Name : Colette, Gender : F, Race : White/Caucasian, Age : 33, City : Seymour, State : WI Country : United States, 

[Papi]

The title of the book is offensive and the author who's African-American should know better. That's good trying to teach people have self-esteem, but using offensive terms to teach self-esteem is not good. 'Nappy' is a word that white slavemasters and racists used when describing pure African slaves'hair texure or the mixed race blacks(like myself) who had kinky/tightly-curled hair during the slavery and Jim Crow days. They used that term to make us feel inferior about having original African hair which is kinky-tightly curled hair. That's why you might hear an African-American saying that another African-American(regardless of skin tone) with naturally straight, wavy, or curly hair has 'good hair'. I used to get fed up when I heard that term, 'good hair' because my hair is naturally kinky-tighlty curled(it was a mixture of curly & straight hair when I was a baby, but kinked up in my toddler years.). I still get upset when people of any race refer my hair texture as 'nappy, bad hair, or nigga hair' because I extremely hated it when they refer those terms to describe my hair texture. Also, by me claiming my mixed heritage as my identity, some people who're uneducated or ignorant would tell me that I'm not mixed because I don't have 'good hair'. Well, I'm caramel/medium light brown skinned and that's NOT a pure original African complexion Pure Africans had excessively dark brown skin. Lenny Kravitz's hair is kinky and his dad is a white Jew. Fredrick Douglass's hair was kinky and his father was a white plantation owner. What make a person is mixed ancestry no matter how they look. So when this white teacher read this book to her students, many black parents were outraged because they felt that her as a white woman saying 'nappy hair' would make them feel ashamed or inferior for having kinky-tightly curled hair. I understand how they felt about that book, but they shouldn't only be upset at the white teacher. They should be upset at the author for using the racist term, 'nappy'! She should have used a politically correct term to describe original African hair texture like kinky or tightly curled hair.

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Name : Papi, Gender : M, Sexual Orientation : Straight/Bi-Curious in a celebate way, Disability : ED, Race : Mixed-Race descent(black, white, & Amerindian), Religion : Catholic, Age : 23, City : Houston, State : TX Country : United States, Education level : High School Diploma, Social class : Lower middle class, 

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