Bilingual and Multicultural Education Conference

Healing Racism in Anchorage, a group I belong to, was invited to present to the Alaska Bilingual and Multicultural Education Conference held in Anchorage this week. Yesterday we did. Shirley Mae Springer Staten and Norwood Eggling did the keynote address. Shirley Mae emphasized the importance of stories in getting these kinds of issues out and talked about discovering she was different on a bus trip to the South as a young girl. "When we share our stories, we open the window on compassion, we open the window on foregiveness, we open the window on love."



Norwood talked about being part of an organization that has Racism in the name. How people are disturbed by the word. Americans don't want to believe that racism exists in the country or in themselves. He also talked about the difference race made by comparing himself - an adopted white boy who spent his preschool years in Japan with Japanese women raising him while his parents worked - and his older sister, who was also adopted, but was Japanese. When the family returned to the US, not that long after WWII, he was easily accepted into the new life, while his Asian sister never did adjust to school.


Toni Pounds, Mari Ogimachi, and I had a smaller session after the keynote. We had a good mix of people - Whites, Alaska Native, Asian, American born and not. Mari was the moderator. We had an exercise which focused people on how they learn about things that affect how they judge people. They rated a number of characteristics from 1 (extremely negative) to 5 (extremely positive). We talked about the things they rated as 1 and then those they rated as 5. Some 1's were: being late, fingernails dirty, missing tooth, carries a bible. As we talked, people explained why they thought this was bad and where these beliefs came from. One Russian woman thought about teachers having students hold out their hands to check the fingernails.
Another woman thought about her religious family always judging her and was thus not happy about the bible, while someone else had imagined a small pocket bible just peeking out of a pocket and saw this as a good thing. Talking about these issues which are fairly easy to talk about publicly, even though they pushed some people's emotional buttons, was a comfortable lead in for Toni to talk about the cycle of oppression. How people absorb beliefs that are reinforced by society and the cycle continues.