Color-Blindness vs. Race Matters: Pre-School Education and the Need for a Communal Vision

Multicultural Education, Summer 2004 by Hein, Christina Judith

Ideally, teachers and parents would be able to learn from incidents such as the one sketched out by Williams. It cannot be enough, once the need for a more efficient multicultural education has been highlighted, to portray the world as structured on a binary of black and white.4 In the following weeks and months, representatives not stereotypes! of other ethnic groups need to find their ways into the world of the nursery school. Again, I would suggest picture books, dolls and action figures, games and songs.5 The walls should feature images and photographs of children of different racial and mixedblood backgrounds. If possible, the school or kindergarten should encourage non-white interns to work and play with the children.6

Stimulating Exchange and Conversation

While a circumferential discourse about race is being kindled within academia, while individual groups and people raise their voices to make persisting shortcomings and injustices known and to alleviate them, there is still an overall lack of open, honest, and meaningful exchange between the racial groups in the United States.7 Williams talks about a "silence that is passed from parent to child" and about "the forbidden gaze" (pp.8-9) that would turn any racial difference imperceptible.

The people that have come to share the geographical and cultural spaces of what is today the United States, ever since the (un)fortunate stranding of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea in 1492, have been unable to construct an acceptable concept of community. Parading as the World Democracy, as the role model for the rest of the conflictstricken world, a number of meaning-makers choose to promote the voices, views, and circumstances of life of only a part of society. The clever employment of rhetorical and other strategic means succeeds to a degree in hiding those who are not able or willing to go in conformity with this concocted picture.

It is a challenge for every single person in the United States to live in the extraordinary situation that the history of the country has brought about, where cultures meet and clash, intersect and mix, and change. What this nation needs in order to mature and to become whole, in my perspective, is a serious and open dialogue.

Rather than shouting meanings into the world, those in positions of power would need to facilitate and engage in communication with representatives of the different groups that constitute the United States of America. Half-forgotten and buried events of the past have to be acknowledged and amended as well as possible. Self-critical reflection and reassessment has to take place.

On a basis of uneducated self-complacency, members of the dominant, 'white' society tend to consider themselves as a human norm. 'Whiteness' remains racially indistinct, while everybody else is coded as other, different, 'ethnic.'8 "Ours must be a world in which we know each other better," Williams argues (p.5). Before this can happen, however, it needs to be a nation in which everybody knows themselves better through the eyes of those who they are sharing the resources of the country with, that is.9