My son is in class with 2 people named Matt. He was trying to get one of the Matt's attention. They both were talking to my son. The conversation likely could be paraphrased like this:
Matts: Which one of us are you trying to talk to?
My Son: The brown one.
His teacher overheard that and gave him a small speech about how he was being racist and he should not talk like that. The specifics would be lost via second hand information. This happened a few days ago and there was no note in the agenda that talked about this (which is normally where I would find correspondence from the teacher).
My information does comes second hand from my 9 year old son however I am confident that he is telling the truth.
While his statement is less that tactful I believe it to be a correct observation. I recall reading something a long time ago that talked about how children are colour-blind in that they see other children and not other children of different heritage etc.
My question is kind of 2 part.
- Could my sons statement be seen as rasicm or racist? I do not think talking about skin colour is inherently racist. .
- Assuming my assertion is true I should say something to the teacher because while I can educate my son, mostly on tact, I do not think called his statement racist is teaching him correctly. What should I say to the teacher? My son could have twisted the words.
I do not think this is something I want to let go as it could give my son the wrong impression of how to deal with other people. It is not a question of it being rude or inappropriate as it definitely was. I think is it a question of if it was racist.