There was an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times yesterday about how racist white people are and how scared we are that black people know. That made me laugh a little. The silver lining on the cloud of prejudice was this finding: when people practice distinguishing faces from a group, like a group of black people, their biases against the group deteriorate.
"I already knew that!" I wanted to shout.
Seriously, though, teaching is one psych experiment after another. A group of 14-18 year old Saudi boys looked like carbon copies until the second week they were in my class, when my vision magically changed. Their faces turned one-of-a-kind and I never confused Mohammed with Tariq again. The byproduct of this sight shift was that I saw the distances between their personalities. There was as much variability among the Saudi boys as between the Saudi boys and their American counterparts.
Conclusion: seeing individuals is the antidote to racism. And language teaching is good for humanity.
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