Reply to Kind of Felt Uncomfortable Because of My Ethnicity On a Tour

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Reply to "Kind of Felt Uncomfortable Because of My Ethnicity On a Tour"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Sounds like many here, including OP, are making lots of half-baked assumptions about what other people are thinking.  You really have no idea what they're thinking or how they're viewing you.  You wouldn't want them making such assumptions about you, so why are you doing it to them?[/quote]

Regardless of what they are thinking, they are behaving very inappropriately for staff of the facility.  While they may be trying to be polite, they are clearly segregating this visiting parent as foreign by  isolating his race as a topic of conversation even when he tried to divert the conversation away from that.  In this day and age for educators to not even be aware of how inappropriate this is suggests that this school and its faculty need to have race-based sensitivity training.

Let's phrase it this way.  If they went out of their way to ask where your grandparents were born and you answered "Spain" and people started telling you all of their stories about how they love Portugese food or that the school celebrates Bastille Day for its French students would you think this was appropriate behavior?  That's the equivalent of what happened to this parent.  They singled him out, awkardly grilled him about his ethnicity and then proceeded to tell him unrelated facts about other Asian cultures such as "culture day" for a parent of a different Asian background, origami and Chinese New Year.  Whatever their point, however well-intentioned, it was very wrong and educators should know that.  It doesn't bode well for the teachers, the school or its students if the teachers do not understand this.  They'll be teaching a whole new generation how to be racially insensitive.  Great.[/quote]

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