AIBU primary teacher branding granddaughter racist

[midlifediva]

AIBU I am fuming, grand daughter was told off by her teacher and called racist, she is only 8. A child in her class siad her new hair style was horrible and made her look poor, she retaliated by saying at least I am not Russian. (the other child is Russian) She was punished by her teacher and marked as racist in some "bad mark book" The other child was not punished. She then cried and when her friends tried to comfort her they were also punished. She is good at school, works hard and is frequently praised for her kindness to others. This new teacher has overstepped the mark IMHO..

The operative word is “imagine”.

Sweet your post at 18.15 highlights exactly what I'm trying to point out. That it's fair game for some to make comments but not for others. I believe as a country we get this wrong.
EVERYONE has a right to live in peace regardless of their ethnic Origen, country of birth, race, religion, sexually, disability and also their own personal characteristics - eg freckles/ glasses.

The fact that some comments seem more fair game than others is despicable. Who are we to decide which comments are more hurtful and life impacting than others.

I believe EVERY comment that's designed to hurt should be considered as hate. Ok, we can't make them all criminal but there should certainly be this standard in education and start educating young.

I actually had this conversation with my ds HT who 100% agreed with me.

In his school pupils are excluded immediately for any racist type comments.

Yet he has been called a spastic in front of staff who have just told the child it's not nice. Ds has a neurological genetic disorder that causes his spasticity.

He couldn't actually justify why one was more hateful than the other - when DS will be disabled his whole life like a black persons will always be black.

He also agreed with me that there's a danger of hate crime being passed on to another minority group as is only racism that's currently part of the recording.

So once children know they absolutely (quite rightly!) cannot be racist we risk those with disability or those who are transgender (for example) becoming the targets are there's no consequence to that.

I repeat - EVERYONE - has a right to a peaceful life regardless of their personal characteristics.

What if she'd said 'at least I'm not black' or 'at least I'm not Indian'?

Both should have been punished and asked to apologise because name-calling is unkind. But your granddaughter's comment was much worse because it's xenophobic (granted, she might not have known this at 8 - but she needs to!), and I imagine the teacher probably wanted to make a thing out of it to the class to demonstrate that it's absolutely not acceptable to mock people for their race/ethnicity/country of origin.

I think the problem here is the idea that someone can be “a racist”. It makes it sound as if it’s unchangable. OP’s granddaughter made a racist comment, which was rightly challenged, and hopefully she’ll learn from it. (It will need to reinforced at home though or she’ll learn nothing.)

I hate the idea that someone can be “a racist”. All that does is give people an opportunity to get their back up when their racism is called out rather than actually understand why what they said or done was racist and actually learning from it.

@youarenotkiddingme

I totally agree with you. Completely 100%

All the while we are obsessed with race we will always miss the importance of intent to cause hurt.

Specially towards Kids with SN.

How is an 8 year old even coming out with stuff like that? I’d be very embarrassed and ashamed if it was my child!

This is a playground spat - such things happen every day.

BOTH children were in the wrong and should have had this clearly explained to them. Recording it as a racist incident and labelling the child a racist is completely ridiculous. It was a failure of kindness on both sides, in one case under provocation. The word racist need not arise - helping children to learn to be kind to each other and how to deal with conflict are ways of avoiding these upsets, regardless of content. Telling a child her hair looks awful rates as equally unkind.

Teaching kindness will cover everything. No labels needed.