What would you do? Sensitivity training vs. re-writing history

ManglerYJ

ManglerYJ

Well-Known Member
Joined
Mar 20, 2005
Location
Lexington, NC
So my 4th grade daughter had a presentation to give at school. After reading a book this summer for Battle of the Books (The Hero Two Doors Down), she was intrigued by the life of Jackie Robinson. She wanted to do her presentation about him.

She did a bunch of research, had to do a time-line of his life and printed a bunch of pictures and facts for her poster board. She had to take her facts straight from the books and show references to them. She typed the facts out and printed them and as we were getting ready to glue them to the board, I saw a problem.....

One of her facts was taken from a rather old source and referred to him as the first Negro professional baseball player. At the time of the writing of that resource material, that was an appropriate term, but it is no longer, and I felt it might be in poor taste to have a little white girl presenting in her class using terminology that while appropriate in the 1960's, would be considered offensive today - even if it is historically period correct.

So my dilemma...... do I go against the instructions that say every fact must be direct from the source? Or do I modify the fact to reflect the times? Trying to explain this problem to my logical 4th grader seemed the be the worst part. Since she had never seen the word before, it had no context. It was just an adjective. It was neither good nor bad.
 
To further compound the problem, he was the first negro/black/african american to play Major League Baseball. There had been professional negro leagues for decades at that point.
 
I'd just call him the first Major League Black American baseball player.

I use Black American every chance I get, I abhor the term African-American.

Because unless you hold dual-citizenship, you are either American or not.
 
Atla said:
I'd just call him the first Major League Black American baseball player.

I use Black American every chance I get, I abhor the term African-American.

Because unless you hold dual-citizenship, you are either American or not.
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This is a good point. A good friend of mine who was a missionary to Burkina Faso held dual citizenship between the U.S. and Burkina Faso, Africa. He would tell people that he is African-American, and they wouldn't believe him because he was just a big fat white guy.
 
Jackie Robinson was overrated as fuck anyway.
 
Contact the teacher and ask how it would best be handled.
 
^^^^^ This.

If you are supposed to be putting the facts exactly as they are stated in the source material, then Negro would stay... As far as I know "Negro" is still a valid race, just like Caucasian, and shouldn't be offensive or inflammatory to anyone, But if you have the oppurtunity, I'd bet the teacher would appreciate you asking for clarification on that.
 
I made the mistake of referring to Japanese during WWII as 'Nips' once in college and apparently that is offensive.

But Nippon was the Japanese name for Japan and it's what we called them back then, but I guess it's kind of like us calling Muslims in Iraq/Afghanistan 'Hajis'.

People seem to take offense at what we call them as we slay them.
 
Jus Jim said:
you're not changing the facts you're just changing the words used.
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This. Changing the term - at ;least in this case - does not change the underlying fact.
 
RatLabGuy said:
This. Changing the term - at ;least in this case - does not change the underlying fact.
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In my 45 year old brain that makes sense...... to a 4th grader (especially my logical OCD child), a fact is a fact is a fact. Changing the word Negro to African American was no different than changing baseball to football.
 
Atla said:
I made the mistake of referring to Japanese during WWII as 'Nips' once in college and apparently that is offensive.

But Nippon was the Japanese name for Japan and it's what we called them back then, but I guess it's kind of like us calling Muslims in Iraq/Afghanistan 'Hajis'.

People seem to take offense at what we call them as we slay them.
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Pretty sure Nips has always been offensive. My grandfather says it, he's a WWII Navy veteran so he means it to be offensive.

I'd just say he was the first black player to play in the MLB. I use black as a term, much the same as I use white to describe myself. I had a friend in college who's dad was from Haiti. He was asked to speak at an African-American conference once and he refused because he said he wasn't African-American, he was Haitian. AA really is a stupid term, there are white and black people all over the world and our cultures are so intertwined that there is no clear boundary any more. I have a good friend who is from South Africa and when he got his US citizenship we started calling him our African American friend. He is ACTUALLY African American, but he's a big ol' white dude.
 
Blaze said:
He is ACTUALLY African American, but he's a big ol' white dude.
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And there in lies the problem, African-American is NOT a race, it describes where someone is now, and where they came from. It's not a race, any more than irish-american, or anglo-saxon.

There are only three 'Races' of humans, Negroid, Mongoloid, And Causcasion.
 
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