When I did my first teaching observation in my first year of uni, I watched a teacher do an adapted version of DeBono’s 6 thinking hats, which I hadn’t heard of before...

In this version of the activity, the teacher asked the kids (Yr 1) to look at the given topic (I don’t remember what it was) through the lens of the 6 different hats, with the white hat being all the good things about the topic and the black hat being all the bad things.

I brought it up in my tutorial as something that I thought was shit and her reply was that I was wrong as the kids were too young to draw any racial parallels so it was harmless and that I shouldn’t write it up in my assignment as I’d likely fail if I did.

So I wrote it up in my assignment, arguing it didn’t matter if kids didn’t make the connection as it is something they‘ll be bombarded with throughout their lives, the idea that white is good and black is bad, so just because this was one of the first times doesn’t make it okay.

As Ali said, “All the good cowboys ride the white horses and wear white hats ... When are we going to wake up as a people and end the lie that white is better than black?”

I ended up getting a HD for that assignment, one of the few I got in my time at uni.

Anyways, seeing a few peeps saying a racist wiggles video is fine as kids are too young to understand racism reminded me of that story...