The Stolen Party Analysis

Seven-year-old Lily is showing her mother around her first grade classroom during a parent and teacher conference. With delight, she shows her mother the arts and crafts they built the day before, the cozy and well-stocked reading nook, and a photograph that was pinned to the attendance board. She then points out her new best friend, Jasmine, a gorgeous black girl from New York. “That’s her, over there with her dad,” says Lily, who is white. “That’s her, over there – the one with the black hair.” Are our children born with prejudice or are they taught to be prejudice to others? Lily is my daughter, and until about five months ago, I had thought of that incident as evidence of brilliant parenting success: My child does not examine skin color!
Nevertheless, increasingly, society shows, that sort of implicit “color blind” approach does not go far enough toward growing equitable belief systems in children. It is a fact, that the human brain simply cannot perceive all people as the same. We are born to discriminate, as harsh as that may seem; born to notice difference between places, facts, and especially each other and categorize them
However, the innocent act of a child pointing out his or her friend to you by saying, “She’s over there or he’s over there, the brown girl or boy.” should come to no surprise to parents, even though it may be shocking to you at first. Throughout our lives, lessons have taught us to segregate and categorize by shape, size, or even color. Lessons taught us that octagons have eight sides, while triangles only have three. To a child, three is less than eight, so therefore the triangle may be inferior. A mind if a child can only tell you that since birth, they have only known that objects are of certain shapes, objects have classifications based on shape, size, and color; there are animals, even people, who are unable to cohabitate with each other. In addition, it is important that we prepare our children about the effects and consequences of prejudice. Rosaura’s mother knew that she had a kind heart, and was only trying to protect her from what she knew was going to happen. Children and adults alike with poor self-images are more vulnerable to developing a habit of being prejudice. They may try to bolster their own self-worth by associating themselves with a group of people whom they feel they are inferior to or can put down. Some children may make fun or exclude other children by virtue of being cool or they are trying to gain some type of