Excerpt from the anti-racism South Pacific song “You’ve got to be taught.”
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate—
You’ve got to be carefully taught!
Excerpt from a Washington Post article about swimming inequity:
At age 8, Gabrielle Day squeezed onto the couch in front of the television at her family’s condo in Panama. She was excited to watch swimming phenom Katie Ledecky compete in the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics.
As Day’s mother, Michelle, made dinner, she worried her daughter might not be looking at the bigger picture.
“Hey, why not watch Simone Manuel?” Michelle called out from the kitchen.
Day glanced at her mom, perhaps wondering why she would focus on anyone other than Ledecky. Then she peeked at the television again and saw Manuel was one of only two Black women on the U.S. swim team.
“You’re right; she looks like me, ” Day recalls saying. . . .
More than seven years later, the Day family remembers that conversation as the first time Gabrielle recognized her distinctiveness.
Day’s mother didn’t teach her daughter to hate whites. But, in the interest of “the big picture,” she steered her away from idolizing the best swimmer in the world because of that swimmer’s race.
It’s interesting that Day “recognized her distinctiveness,” not because other kids called her attention to it — e.g. by teasing her — but because her mother highlighted it. Day, it seems, had to be taught by her relative.
The Post’s article referencing Day is called “In the pool, ‘nobody else looks like me.’” The subtitle is “Bullis’ Day is among area’s young Black swimmer grappling with sport’s lack of diversity.” But why is this something that needs to be “grappled” with?