Anti-Racist Thought Bubble: Kids and Costumes

A post on anti-racism remains incomplete if I do not mention that it is the 14th Amendment's birthday today! Happy birthday, #14!

I work as a substitute teacher at a large day-care center near my university. This day-care center is one of the best in the area and I love working there. Yesterday, something happened that caught my attention, but I was surprised that no other caregivers noticed.

The children were having their faces painted in the afternoon by one of the afternoon TAs. I was attending to other things, so I only saw them after their faces were all painted. One boy, age 4, was going around telling the parents as he arrived that he was an "Indian Tiger". He has a Latina mother, but he appears white. His face was painted in white, orange, yellow, green, and black stripes. Other kids were also tigers with traditional orange and black stripes. The parents were all saying things like, "Yeah!" or "Cool." Some of the other children started repeating this: "He's an Indian tiger." Each time, the parents provided some kind of non-committal positive response.

My initial response was, "Oh no, we have inadvertently taught this child that a racial identity is something you can put on and take off!" After speaking with my friend who is Native American last night, and my co-teachers this morning, I have a few more thoughts in my head:

1) Indian tigers are a real animal. They are tigers that live in India. It is possible that this is what the child was thinking of.

2) The TA who painted the faces does not have a higher education. It is possible that she projected her stereotype onto this child.

3) The child may not be old enough to understand how dressing up as someone of another race or ethnicity is racist.

So what to do?

The other teachers and I came up with the following ideas:

1) Ask the children to clarify their pretend play. Are they only being animals, or are they actually pretending to be Native Americans?If the former, focus on the animal aspect of the play to keep it neutral. If the latter, explain that we don't play that in this classroom.

2) Make Native American people concrete instead of abstract by doing a project about them, e.g. building canoes out of paper and learning about how they were made in real life (this was my friend's suggestion).

I'm still worried about the possibility of a child dressing up as an Indian come Halloween, but I figure that bridge can be crossed when we come to it. The classroom is very diverse for a small town (about half the children are non-white), and there have been no or very few racialized incidents as far as I know. My biggest concern is that as a (white) educator in a white supremacist society, how I can convey anti-racist thought/education to the children without appearing PC or hoity-toity. Most of the other staff are from white working-class backgrounds, and I do not want to alienate them. I am still going to try my best to stay true to my anti-oppression politics in the classroom while teaching and caring for these kids to the best of my ability, because I really love them all, and I want their minds and bodies to be free.