[Tatum Annotation]

In class we were asked to annotate ab excerpt from Beverly Daniel Tatum's "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?".
I felt strongly about some of the points she made and so I'll be choosing to write about those. This whole day has been full of rage, but I'll try to tone it down a bit.

Tatum starts right off assuming that racial hate-crimes occur everywhere and fails to prove to me why it's relevant. Hate crimes may or may not be the product of prejudice, and it could be that we record hate crimes incorrectly. Let's say a white guy robs a black guy-it's not always hate. Maybe they just had a good prosecutor. In any case, not all racial hate crimes are directed at "people of colour," of course, and she doesn't try to prove that they are. She just throws it down in a list as if trying to overwhelm me with her "facts and expertise."

I felt uninformed while reading practically the whole article because Tatum doesn't elaborate on points of interest. I couldn't care less about her students' poll at young children, because I distinctly remember being a child in a similar situation. I lived in Europe until I was 8 years old. I lived in a white community in Swindon. It was England, and we just didn't have black people in our community. So, I'd never seen a black person outside of the media. Maybe I did draw conclusions about them, it didn't matter. What people showed me didn't breed any hatred or contempt for black people. I really didn't care, and I don't think any kids do. To say all kids are free of prejudice is a stretch, but I wasn't equipped with enough examples or experiences to draw any conclusion, and thus, any prejudiced opinion. Perhaps a drawing I would have done at 5 might have come out looking "racist." That didn't mean all my thoughts were racist. It just meant that's how it was shown to me. Children are to an extent independent and free to make or not make conclusions based on the ideas around them. So Tatum, I'd prefer it if you didn't accuse me, and all people, of being ignorant and angry enough to draw those kinds of conclusions JUST BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T GROW UP IN AN INTEGRATED NEIGHBORHOOD. It wasn't a good thing or a bad thing.

Also, who says "Indian" is an offensive term for Native American? I have cousins who live up on a reservation in Washington state. Everyone just calls them Indian, and they don't mind. It may be "politically incorrect," but it isn't hurting anyone. I don't feel comfortable using the term myself, but I don' t think it's right to say kids have the wrong idea by associating Native Americans with the word "Indian."

About this paragraph, which I will now paste:

"What had this woman learned about who in our society is considered beautiful and who is not? Had she imagined Elizabeth Taylor when she thought of Cleopatra? The new information her classmate had shared and her own deeply ingrained assumptions about who is beautiful and who is not were too incongruous to allow her to take in this new information at that moment."

I think this whole paragraph, or rather, essay, is assumption. I'm bored with her assumptions. I'm bored with her assuming racism can be cleaned like air, that since I'm white I'm racist, that I must breed harmful prejudice in order to be normal, that that's not my fault, etc.

As far as I'm concerned if I am racist, it's my own fault. I have a think called FREE WILL and even without that, I have freedom of thought. I've always had the responsibility to stand up to racist ideas that are flung at me just because I live in 2009's USA. I have no idea who Tatum is trying to appeal to, but it's not going to be me. I know I'll probably have to analyze more of her work later on-I can only hope that it doesn't disagree with me like this did.