To think that whilst DS' comment was wrong it was not racist?

[HaHaLOL]

DS is in year 7. An Indian girl was talking very quickly in English to him and being silly. He said "stop talking flippin' Hindu".

Today we've had a letter saying he has been given a Senior Staff Detention, in big bold letters - "for making a racist comment". He told me he had to write a letter to her and her parents (don't have a problem with this at all). This is all because the parents have made a complaint against him.

Now he has a fiery temper and we can imagine him saying sth like that out of anger/frustration. DH is sure it's not actually a racist comment and thinks it's like saying to someone "stop speaking double Dutch" and he thinks its PC gone mad.

DS' head of year told him today that his comment will go to the local council and be recorded in a "racist comments" book. Is this true?! Surely she wouldn't have made it up!

I would add that DH's best two best friends are Chinese and Indian. We lived in Asia for a year. DS went to a huge international school. He would have had more nationalities in his class than the whole of our town I would imagine. His best friends were Japanese, Korean, American and English. For 2 years DS has been learning Mandarin. I cannot imagine a more culturally aware 11 year old among his peers.

DH wants to write to the Head to challenge the racism angle, particularly if it's gone down in some record at the council.

I hope this post doesn't offend anyone. I just want to get some other views, please.

Thank you.

Being asked to acknowledge that something is racist, and apologise for saying it, is not heavy handed.

The child has not been labelled a racist. He has been told that he has made a racist comment, which is true.

The comment being recorded by the council is not a heavy handed punishment, as it does not punish the child, the child is not even named. It simply means that the council is aware of it, and can take action if a particular school or area seems to have a problem of a racist culture.

The comment being recorded by the school on the pupil's record is not heavy handed. A teacher commented above about an incident with a baked bean being flicked. In itself this is not a big deal, but the school has recorded it in case it forms a pattern of behaviour - if they did not record the incident and the pupil continued to behave poorly, the school would not have any proof and could not take action. And as someone mentioned above, if they didn't record it and say there were no racist incidents, but an Ofsted inspector interviewed a child or parent who said that there had been, the school would be in deep shit.

My impression is that most of us who have said "yes, the comment was racist" (and it was) have then gone on to say "but this doesn't mean the child is." We all know children make daft remarks without thinking them through. It sounds like the incident was handled correctly - the boy was disciplined for making the comment in a proportionate way, he wrote an apology to the girl concerned, the school will have documented it (those in education up thread have explained that this will have been done in an anonymous way when it comes to returning statistics to the LA). And they have to keep records to differentiate between children like OP's who make a one-off, ill thought out comment, and pupils who are systematically engaging in racist bullying. Job should have been done and dusted at that point. Except OP want a whole thread to make a song and dance which as far as I can see boils down to "but some of my best friends are..."

I'd have been mortified if my DS had done this, I'd sincerely hope that it was a moment of unthinking stupidity, and I'd hope that the way the school handled it (and I'd assume my son's school would handle it in the same way) would bring home the message to think before you open your mouth. As someone upthread said, better a detention at school age 11 than sacked from his first job.

I think it's drip feeding because if someone said to me they had been accused of racism, I would ask them exactly what it is they had said, to be clear of the facts and work out whether or not the accusation had grounds. I would be particularly keen to ascertain the facts if the person being accused was my child, who I understandably was keen to protect, even if they had done wrong. If my child said "mum someone said I was racist, a Chinese girl was speaking English really fast and I told them to stop speaking Chinese", I would say "well son, that was pretty racist and here is why". I would not bleat to the school or MN about the injustice. If they said "mum someone said I was racist, a Chinese girl was speaking English really fast and mixing it up with Chinese and I told her to stop speaking Chinese", I would say to them that is not racist, and make an appointment with the school to deal with it.

That's not how the OP has told the story though - her initial argument was that the boy told the girl to stop speaking an Indian language when she was speaking English, that her husband was angry that this was being labelled as racist as a) either the boy didn't intend it to be racist, which as has been many times, is not really the point. It was a racist comment or b) the boy was confused about Hindu and Hindi, which again is immaterial, he was pejoratively pointing out a difference purely based on her ethnicity, which is racist.

It had been two weeks up to last night and the OP thought the girl had been speaking English, she comes on MN and people say it was racist, then suddenly within a couple of hours her son says "actually mum she was speaking English and Hindi"... doesn't quite make sense.

Floggingmolly , oh, come off it, it is not a horribly racist comment, it's at worse a very misguided one (and stupid, if you want).
Reserve the Horror for a truly devastating comment.

OfaFrenchMind - not horribly racist, if by horribly you mean using the N word, making jokes about lynching, that sort of thing. But it's the steady drip-drip-drip of comments like this which adds up (I watched it being done to Muslim and Hindu friends when I was at school). So the only sensible anti-racism policy for a school to have is zero tolerance.

How would you feel if your workplace, or your children's school, had a threshold anti-bullying policy, and week, week out your colleagues, or your children's peers were subjected to minor incidents, only to be told "well, none of them actually went over the threshold for us to take them seriously"?

Sorry, I got my timescales wrong, it seems the incident was a week or two ago but the OP knew at least on Monday, but it still stands that there have been unbelievable drip feeds. If your child is accused of something you get the whole story from them before taking any action. Which is why I do not believe the girl was suddenly speaking "english and hindi", this sounds like a rewriting of history to get off the hook, rather than admitting that something wrong has been done.

Chimes, there are several posts on this thread saying something similar to aerminger, and they haven't been deleted. So where do you get the idea that you are not allowed to say things like this on MN?

So it's just me, then, is it Icimoi - because I've said exactly the same thing and got slated for it or everyone has piled in.

Having your comments disagreed with and even criticised isn't the same as being forbidden from commenting.

Be careful aermingers or they might turn their attention away from me and start on you. You are NOT allowed to say what you said, dontcha know? At least, not on MN..........

........Because they will turn on you, like they did me. No way did I imply that MN did not ALLOW this. Please get a grip Icimoi and stop nitpicking.

I've read through this thread and one side definitely seems over-emotional. The side that keeps interpreting "boy pulled up on racist comment" to mean "boy branded racist forever", that is.

. I just don't expect that an 11 year old boy would understand the ramifications about that or even know of all the different types to that detail etc. He didn't think too hard about what he said. It was an off the cuff comment that was not borne out of any desire to be racist.

What? What? What? WHAT?!

I could have told you at 11 that having brown skin didn't make you a Hindu, and I knew the difference between Hindi and Hindu earlier than that. In fact, I think I DID. I clearly remember, at 11, pulling up a girl for calling bindis "P spots". When she said, Ps wear them, I pointed out that:
a) it's a nasty word,
b) Pakistan is an Islamic republic,
c) bindis are associated with Hinduism, not Islam.

I was and am neither particularly bright, nor particularly cosmopolitan, unlike your International school-attending, Mandarin-learning son. In fact, I'd only ever left my home town to visit the seaside. I had, however, read a couple of supermarket primary children's books on religions of the world, and was vaguely aware that the Partition of India had, y'know, happened.

Get this for your son: www.amazon.co.uk/Sainsburys-Religions-Of-The-World/dp/B000RMAQWI . My late grandmother bought it for me as a treat for being good during the shopping over twenty years ago.

It's not perfect- it's a primary school children's book (it was years before I realised it's commonly written Diwali not Divali as printed in the edition I had...) but it's probably about the right level as a starting point.

"When I said, 'You are NOT allowed to say that on MN', of course I didn't mean MN didn't allow you to say it!"

Well, I never thought this thread would make me LOL, but life's full of surprises.

Presumably, ChimesAndCarols, since you didn't actually mean that, it's irrelevant that you said it? I think I'm getting the hang of this.

Be careful aermingers or they might turn their attention away from me and start on you. You are NOT allowed to say what you said, dontcha know? At least, not on MN..........

........Because they will turn on you, like they did me. No way did I imply that MN did not ALLOW this. Please get a grip Icimoi and stop nitpicking.

So in Chimes' world, the words "You are NOT allowed to say what you said ... At least, not on MN" cannot possibly imply that MN doesn't allow it. I think you may have a unique interpretation there, Chimes.

Posts from loads of people on both sides of the argument have been the subject of robust criticism, not least from you. Yet only you interpret this as in some way preventing you from expressing your opinions. It's all very reminiscent of commenters on Daily Mail articles who love to make inflammatory comments followed by something like "but you're not allowed to say that" despite the fact that they manifestly have been allowed to say it on a national newspaper website.

And as for your final sentence, since when was it nitpicking to challenge provocative statements that are manifestly untrue? Are we supposed to ignore them? Since when?

Maki - OP's original account was that the girl was speaking English when the boy told her to stop speaking Hindi. That would have been racist. OP has since come on to say that actually the girl was speaking a mixture of English and Hindi ... at which point some people began to suspect that she might be re-writing history to gain more support (of course it's also possible her 11-year-old originally gave her a garbled version of things).

But as described in the OP, the remark was a racist one in the circumstances originally set out.

ChimesAndCarols - It's also amusing because oftentimes, folks who are complaining you're not allowed to say X,Y and Z any more, are writing said complaint in a tabloid with around 2 million readers, for a huge wodge of cash.

And this is largely the angle you have taken in this debate. Freely held. On a site with ~1m readers(?).

You endangered, beleaguered minority, you.

Does the girl even speak Hindi, ever? I would not be surprised if she doesn't, and in fact actually happens to speak another one of the hundreds of living languages of South Asia!

The boy may think she does, but given he may have confused Hindi with Hindu, I don't think he's reliable!

Tsk, xpost with Icimoi. Must be that phone call we got from the police state. (JOKE, claig....)

@Claig: Yes, it is encroaching on other things too, it is the ever increasing march of political correctness and will probably one day lead us to Big Brother with reporting and records and files for relatively minor things

So Claig you think that you should be allowed to make racist statements with no repercussions? and which type of racism should be allowed so that you have your freedom of speech?

The whole incident seems to have been blown up out of all proportion to me. OP, you mentioned that the child was belittling our son and he is sensitive, if it was me I'd be in there with one huge bullying complaint the minute she is at it again.

'you think that you should be allowed to make racist statements with no repercussions?'

Of course not. I just think that saying things that are not racist should not be disallowed.

Of course it was a racist remark. And an ignorant one to boot (the Hindu/Hindi confusion). That does not mean your son is a dyed-in-the-wool racist. He clearly didn't understand the implications of his words. But it is a good thing that the school authorities are taking this seriously, to show your son precisely what was wrong about his comment.

I remember once coming home from school repeating a racist word I'd heard from a schoolmate, one that I'd never heard before and about whose implications I was completely ignorant. My mother very quickly set me straight, and her shock and revulsion at hearing me say that word have stayed with me to this day. I was about 7 years old at the time. I didn't know that it was racist but it certainly was.

If the girl's mother actually gave a presentation to the school about Hinduism, that makes your son's remarks even nastier TBH. It means he did know something about her background and he was evidently trying to use that information to insult her.

And I don't buy the excuse now that actually she was speaking two languages. Surely he would have mentioned that before, and 500 posts into a long thread is awfully late to add that bit of information.

Sigh