“One student had been on vacation in LA, and I asked her if she enjoyed it. We got onto the topic of transport, and I mentioned that I’d assumed you would have to get around by car. She remarked ‘yes, public transport is very dangerous, a lot of black people get on‘.
An older lady had lived in Chicago for a few years. She said ‘I’m afraid of black people. They’re so big‘.
When I was discussing the idea of going to India with a student: ‘No, I don’t want to go. There are a lot of murderers and criminals‘. When I asked her why she thought that, she simply said ‘they have black skin‘.
Another student who’d just come back from a holiday in Bali said she had a lovely time there, ‘but I don’t like black people‘.”
“Yesterday, I was teaching a class about appearances and gave them pictures of different celebrities and asked them to tell me what they looked like. One of those pictures was of Wyclef Jean, which led one student to ask me “can I call him ‘negro‘?” When I responded with “absolutely not”, they were puzzled. They genuinely didn’t seem to know that it was an inappropriate or offensive term and thankfully, were very open to hearing my explanation, so I took time out of the class to make it very clear what words were OK and not OK for them to use and why, which is obviously not something I do when I have a student who makes an intentionally racist remark out of hate. I’m glad we were able to have that conversation.