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Who cares if our children grow up to be racists?

Racism is learned. No one cares about racist students.

Sam
5 min readMar 9, 2018

Hey, I’m not an official anti-racism educator. But I am a student and a subject of anti-racism. Many people of color are anti-racism educators for free and by force. We’ve answered and auto-corrected race-based questions long before Google.

Myself, I had a college roommate remind me of how Black people have an extra muscle in our legs for athletics. He repeated it like a fact he had learned. So, yeah, I have a stake in schools too.

Here’s my theory — we don’t care if our children grow up to be racists. Sure, it’s not ideal, but we don’t care if it happens. If we did, anti-racism education would be a requirement in schools.

With every turn of a tassel, we say, an anti-racist mindset is unnecessary for students to develop.

And, that’s not because racism and bias are impossible to measure. Like math, there are tests, tools, and resources to evaluate racism.

Instead, we leave anti-racism to parents. Or worse, we all hope children get it somehow.

But can’t we do more to stunt the seeds of racism from growing?

This is why discrimination, stereotypes, and inequalities persist.

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