I never liked being called a person of color, though people calling us black didn't bother me as much. It's just semantics, right? But I nearly gagged this morning when I heard an innocent nine-year-old white girl saying, "we should call them (the looters) people of color because 'black' sounds bad." I looked at my daughter- her shoulders were down with blank stares at her computer screen. The homeroom teacher encouraged the little girls to "take action" and added that "these people are looting because they are angry. And they are angry because of racism." My heart started to race as the last thing I wanted the teacher to teach is to (1) identify people by race, (2) justify looting and rioting, (3) ask the girls to "do something." So my daughter and I had a talk after her zoom homeroom. Here are some of the things my nine-year-old said. (1) It sounds like only white people are "normal" people, and other people aren't...
Jazz composer and violinist Meg Okura her thoughts on religion, culture, race, motherhood and all that jazz from her immigrant, Jewish, woman, Japanese, ex-Evangelical, and black family perspectives.