"Human Beings differ in a number of inherited features, e.g. skin colour; shape of nose, eyes, lips; type and colour of hair. They are: Yellow featured. Yellow, copper skin; fairly broad nose... White featured. Pink, olive, light brown skin... Black featured. Black or dark brown skin; broad nose, thick lips..."
ANGUS MACIVER, THE NEW FIRST AID IN ENGLISH SECOND EDITION, PG. 128
The New First Aid in English Second Edition (Hodder Gibson, 2006) is a staple in our home. An earlier version of the book called The New First Aid in English Revised, published in 1986, was a central part of English language practice during my junior and high school days in Jamaica. Shortly after we arrived in Canada, my husband and I bought this second edition.
Anyone who does a fair bit of writing or editing could probably relate to the idea of having a companion text like The New First Aid in English on hand for quick reference. Aside from English grammar checks, it is a helpful reminder about the information we don't keep at the top of our minds. For instance, what do you call a group of chickens? A brood. People at a rowdy scene? A rabble. What sound does a crow make? It caws (that one still stings – my husband and I had a bitter row over that word in a Scrabble game many years ago. Feelings were hurt, a mom was called, enough said).
I have two daughters, ages ten and seven when writing this. Both girls are really into books and will read anything they can get their hands on; The New First Aid in English is no exception. They enjoy the word-building and absurdities exercises. The book is filled with pencil marks from where my oldest daughter answered all the associations and analogies questions. Our family likes to make word games out of classifications and gradations, and sometimes, we use the book to study up for Scrabble matches.
Recently, my 10-year-old daughter, LeeAnn, read on page 128 of the second edition book that there are classifications for human beings based on the colour of their skin and their hair type – whether it is straight or curly and the colour, the shape of their noses – narrow or broad, the colour and shape of their eyes, and the thickness of their lips.
After seeing this, LeeAnn’s question was: why does that matter?
I paused when she showed me the text and asked her question again. I intended to tell her that it is just a classification strategy, a method of using descriptors to express groups we wish to identify as having things in common or needing to be recognized as different from other things that may seem similar. Then I saw that the page heading was: "Useful Information," and I reconsidered my answer.
It was April 2020. My daughters were in their second week of home learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, and they had already lost interest in whatever online learning tips, tricks, or treats their teachers or I doled out.
In addition, despite COVID-19, the #BlackLivesMatter movement was on the upswing. We were inundated with news and social media reports about the tragedies the movement sought to draw attention to and how different communities handled the calls for action. My daughters were deeply affected by it. They had never felt so much anxiety about being Black. So, LeeAnn’s question was perfectly timed, and our home learning situation put me in a position to help her find the answers she wanted.
Acknowledging my insecurities
I have my insecurities about being Black. I grew up in a country where about 92% of the population identifies as Black. I felt no apparent discrimination from other Jamaicans because of the colour of my skin, the curliness of my hair, or the flatness of my nose. But there was an undercurrent of bias.
The messages were insidious. The images I saw in books and on television and the ideals of what we celebrated as successful and beautiful in our daily conversations were not Black. Those images had fairer skin, straight or less curly hair, and more angled noses than my own. I, and many Black girls and boys I knew growing up, aspired to become that ideal in one way or another.
I suspect that open discrimination did not exist in my childhood world because even people who were brown and fair-skinned were still considered Black. As I grew older, I learned I would only be called Black if mine was the darkest coloured skin in the room. So, in my lifetime, I have been described as having dark, brown, and fair skin – it all depended on who I was standing next to. But in the grand scheme of things, other than self-esteem issues, there were minimal repercussions to those interpretations of Blackness that I encountered in Jamaica.
Why race matters
My first real challenge with racism came when I travelled outside of Jamaica. It was in the UK, at around age 19, that I first felt unsafe because I was Black. On a train ride from London to Camberley one Sunday afternoon, I had my first encounter with other human beings who threatened me with violence simply because I wore Black skin. As terrifying as that encounter was, the thing that was most traumatizing about the experience was that none of the other train passengers came to my defence. I was alone, this young Black girl, against a group of white boys. Even if they had different reasons, I interpreted the bystanders' silence as confirmation that I was less than them, just as the group of boys said.
"The way I see it, class was the real social divider in the place where I grew up."
I am confident that that kind of assault, and the bystanding of it, would never have happened in my own country. The way I see it, class was the real social divider in the place where I grew up. Living in poverty comes with many indignities, so the feelings of shame and guilt are not new. Yet, as I would learn throughout my first year living abroad, the worst kind of indignity is the kind of discrimination that stares you right in the face and claims to be the source of authority about yourself.
For example, Cadet uniforms at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in the UK, where I trained to become a Commissioned Officer, required ‘nude’ tights for women wearing work dress and ‘black’ tights for ceremonial dress. Against my skin, ‘black’ stockings looked black, but ‘nude’ pantyhose looked white. It looked ridiculous, and no one else wore white tights. It was an uphill battle to get permission to wear tights that were a colour that would look nude against my skin. The colour is ‘French coffee,’ and it took me three and a half months of asking to get permission to wear them.
No one, not even I, understood why it was such a big deal to me at the time. In the late 1990s, when this happened, it was about how I looked: silly, tatty, colours clashing left and right. I was the Black girl wearing white tights, while the others appeared neat and polished because their uniform looked as intended - as if they wore nothing on their legs.
"My new community was intolerant of, or at the very least in denial about, my racial identity."
Now that I am older and wiser, I realize it was a big deal because it infringed on my sense of self. I was made to do and be something else because the world I was in then refused to acknowledge that what worked for one group of human beings, the human beings that fit the majority characterizations, did not work for everyone. Thus, the reality was that my new community was intolerant of, or at the very least in denial about, my racial identity.
Another international Cadet who came to Sandhurst a term after me was made to remove the braids from her hair. Naturally, she complied, but if you do not wear Black skin and have Black hair, you cannot understand how hurtful a request like that can be.
Intolerances like this go well beyond race. They overlap with gender, culture, sexuality, and all other forms of identity that people are told to put away lest they lose the privilege of being treated as self-determined human beings. It is a level of discrimination that feels so violent that one can scarcely call it intolerance. You have to call it by its real name. Aggression.
Teaching without telling
So, with all my baggage about race and identity, I must sit with my daughter's question about what is 'useful information' and address her anxieties about where she stands in the spectrum of racial classifications. I am a scholar and an educator. I am also a mother gifted the opportunity to raise two conscientious and kind humans. Teaching without telling is my favourite power-with approach. And so, we started co-learning.
The most important lesson was understanding if and how the classifications could best be used. LeeAnn and I set a lofty goal: to debunk the (possibly racist) misinformation that The New First Aid in English Second Edition claims is useful information. We began with the assumption that it was misinformation because it presented reductive descriptions of complex human characteristics. But was it racist? We turned the wheels on that one for a bit, reading definitions of racism and racialization on the internet and talking about when something is racist and when it is not.
Even as an adult, with all the experiences of subtle and blatant racism under my belt, I had no clear answer. Racism nowadays isn't something that can be shunted into black-and-white thinking. Many people do and say things without understanding that they could be considered racist. For example, one of our white friends refers to my husband as a ‘chocolate teddy bear.’ I chuckle whenever I think about my other friend whose six-year-old son once insisted that my favourite ice cream flavour was chocolate. It made all the sense to him; he is white, and his favourite ice cream flavour is vanilla. However, I felt offended when an older white man in the waiting room at our family doctor’s office in Winnipeg described my daughters' hair as ‘nappy.’
These personal encounters with racializing talk are vastly different from the policies of discrimination designed to make those who are racially diverse feel and look like outsiders – like the Sandhurst uniform policy I mentioned earlier. The outcomes are also quite different when the policies and behaviours put people’s lives, income, well-being, or sense of safety at risk. For example, one needs only look at #BlackLivesMatter, #IndigenousLivesMatter, #AllLivesMatter, and countless other campaigns.
LeeAnn and I agreed that we could not decide if the words were meant to be racist, but if we were in a scenario where someone spoke to us and acted in a manner that echoed the words of the text in a way that made us feel uncomfortable, we would call that person racist.
"Racism is about how the people around you make you feel."
Victory! First lesson learned: racism is not some abstract concept you hear about on the news or read about in books or on social media posts; it is about how the people around you make you feel. If I feel safe, assuming I must love chocolate ice cream because my skin colour resembles chocolate is not a problem. I will laugh about it with you (and your parents) because I think it's funny that you thought that up. But even as we laugh, I know your parents will teach you why that thinking needs to change. That is my safety. If I feel unsafe, your words will rub me the wrong way.
And why race doesn't matter
After our nearly hour-long struggle with the concept of racism, we returned to our study of the words on page 128 of The New First Aid in English. The aim now was to determine if the information was indeed ‘useful’ as the book claims. With basic data-collecting skills in hand, we set out to put the information to the test.
From our living room window, we watched people walking along the sidewalk in front of our house. I asked LeeAnn to identify how many people checked all the boxes for the Yellow, Black, and White classifications. We both grew weary of the exercise within minutes. It felt disrespectful to reduce the people we saw to racial descriptions. Ms. So-and-So is not who she is because she is "White featured with straight hair and a predominantly straight nose." She is the lady who lives down the street and sets out a table at the front of her house to give out Halloween candy each year. Mr. XYZ, who walks by our house daily, isn’t who he is because he is "Black featured with short curly hair and a round flat nose." He is the guy who always says hello to us when we are out tending the front yard or sitting on our porch.
We gave up when we saw our first anomaly, a teenager who lives a few blocks past our house and walks by about the same time every day on her way from her job. We did not know her name, but we are on walk-by greeting terms with her parents – one is "White featured," and the other is "Yellow featured." This time, it was me, tired of keeping track of what people looked like, who asked, “Why does this matter?” And my daughter answered: “I don’t see how it matters. This isn’t useful at all.”
"If you choose to go by what people look like, you are racializing them."
Here is the second lesson learned: If you choose to go by what people look like, you are racializing them, which means that all human beings can be racialized. This does not necessarily imply that racialization is a bad thing. After all, we use racialized descriptors to make distinctions among people when it matters. For example, to tell this story, I must talk about my Black self, my white friends, and the features of the people who walk past our house. It is simply a method of communicating information that helps to clarify what I need to describe. To that end, most of us engage in racialization to distinguish ourselves (and the people who look just like us) from anyone who does not look like us when the situation calls for it.
But when is racialization not useful? This is the third lesson: Tune into your sense of what is right and fair to find out. LeeAnn initially complained about the book passage because she sensed it was unfair and unjust. She raised an eyebrow, asked a question, and wanted an engaged answer. She is learning to discern right and just information from wrong and unjust information. There is no universal script for how to do this. It all boils down to what we consider fair and proper as individuals and communities.
For people of colour, the human beings that The New First Aid in English describes as Yellow and Black featured, there is a history of discrimination due to racialization, which was consciously and unconsciously shaped by colonial, neocolonial, and imperialist practices. For a long time, those practices were taken as correct or acceptable by many, sometimes even by those who were being discriminated against. Those mechanisms for seeing and treating people of colour differently are now institutionalized in various ways. But people of colour have always pushed back against that taken-for-granted way the mainstream sees and acts towards us. We do it out of a sense of justice and fairness. In many instances, the people who descriptively fall within the mainstream, the "White featured" human beings the book refers to, will support, and sometimes lead, the call for justice for people of colour because of a shared sense of community and humanity.
Meeting controversy with curiosity
Critical thinking happens when we open ourselves up to the potential for controversy. Those worrying classifications in The New First Aid in English that perturbed LeeAnn became an excellent opportunity for us to talk about why we are different looking from the other people that she goes to school with. But it also affirms for her that we are all equally valuable as human beings, no matter what they or we look like. Race matters, but it also doesn't. It's the people and the feelings that you should be paying attention to.
"It's okay to feel offended by descriptors that reduce people's humanity."
LeeAnn is discovering that it is okay to feel offended when she sees descriptions and actions that reduce the humanity of people we know and do not know. She is learning to see it as a form of othering that paves the way for discrimination, stereotypes, and dehumanization. She is coming to understand that it is okay to stand up to anyone who says that her hair, nose, or skin colour matters in how she is being treated. She is learning to appreciate that it is also important that she stand up for others who would be told the same, even if they look different from her.
Moreover, when something seems unfair and unjust, she raises an eyebrow. She is comfortable expressing that the information seems off, and she wants to engage with supporting adults in a discussion about it. When she talks about it and how the information makes her feel as a person, she better understands what all people of all identities have been struggling with for generations. These are great things to know and understand when you live in a world where prejudice exists in many forms. This is an empowered way to be a Black girl in Canada.
Will we keep our copy of The New First Aid in English Second Edition? Absolutely! How else will we quickly remind ourselves about essential English grammar rules or study new words to add to our Scrabble repertoire? Learning about the world and where you stand begins with questioning what you know and what you think you know. I am pleased that we have the book and that it gave us this lesson on why race matters and doesn't.
"Information is never perfect, and information sources can be flawed."
The real lesson for LeeAnn was that something with great use could also violate our sense of self. She now understands that information is never perfect and that information sources, even printed books, can be flawed. We can choose to take what we want from it. We can also teach ourselves and others that there is right and just information and wrong and unjust information. Both are valuable because they help us to make sense of the world.
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