I Taught My 4th Grade Class About White Privilege And Their Response Was Eye-Opening

I was one of those kids, a Xennial growing up lower-middle class in a small New Hampshire city with my parents and younger brother. In 1990, the state was 98% white. In my high school graduating class of 264, only three students were nonwhite. Needless to say, I was not exposed to meaningful discussions about race. Instead, my family was indoctrinated by Rush Limbaugh, whose radio show provided a soundtrack for our home. My Republican father criticized affirmative action because it gave minority groups an unfair advantage in a country where, he claimed, everyone has an equal opportunity “as long as they work hard.” My mother, a French immigrant, adopted his views by osmosis. I did too, and held on to them throughout my 20s, until one professor changed everything.

While obtaining my master’s degree in education in 2009, I was required to take a course called “Language, Power and Democracy.” The monthlong class explored white privilege and America’s ongoing racial divide, and was taught mostly through documentaries and discussions. Redlining and Reconstruction were just some of the topics covered. My belief that class outweighed race in determining opportunities began to erode. After a month of evidence-based lectures and thoughtful conversations with my racially diverse classmates, I began to see America’s institutional racism.

Each October, my students reviewed what they learned in third grade about Christopher Columbus. Then I would read “Encounter” to provide them with a different point of view. The children’s book is told through the eyes of a young Taino boy recounting the Italian explorer’s arrival, and the ensuing enslavement and brutality he unleashed on the native people. My students were simultaneously fascinated and shocked, leading most to write essays about why Columbus Day should no longer be celebrated.

Jane Hyatt Yolen was born on February 11, 1939, at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan. She is the first child of Isabell Berlin Yolen, a psychiatric social worker who became a full-time mother and homemaker upon Yolen's birth, and Will Hyatt Yolen, a journalist who wrote columns at the time for New York newspapers,[6] and whose family emigrated from the Ukraine to the United States.[1] Isabell also did volunteer work, and wrote short stories in her spare time. However, she was not able to sell them. Because the Hyatts, the family of Yolen's grandmother, Mina Hyatt Yolen, only had girls, a number of the children of Yolen's generation were given their last name as a middle name in order to perpetuate it.[6]

Various scholars have addressed the question of who were the native inhabitants of the Caribbean islands to which Columbus voyaged in 1492. The assumption that European accounts can be read as objective evidence of a native Caribbean social reality is unjustified.[8] The people who inhabited most of the Greater Antilles when Europeans arrived in the New World have been denominated as Taínos, a term coined by Constantine Samuel Rafinesque in 1836.[2] Taíno is not a universally accepted denomination—it was not the name this people called themselves originally, and there is still uncertainty about their attributes and the boundaries of the territory they occupied.[9]

The term nitaino or nitayno, from which "Taíno" derived, referred to an elite social class, not to an ethnic group. No 16th-century Spanish documents use this word to refer to the tribal affiliation or ethnicity of the natives of the Greater Antilles. The word tayno or taíno, with the meaning "good" or "prudent", was mentioned twice in an account of Columbus's second voyage by his physician, Diego Álvarez Chanca, while in Guadeloupe. José R. Oliver writes that the natives of Boriquén, who had been captured by the Caribs of Guadeloupe, and who wanted to escape on Spanish ships to return home to Puerto Rico, used the term to indicate that they were the "good men", as opposed to the Caribs.[2]

Contrarily, according to Peter Hulme, most translators appear to agree that the word taino was used by Columbus's sailors, not by the islanders who greeted them, although there is room for interpretation. The sailors may have been saying the only word they knew in a native Caribbean tongue, or perhaps they were indicating to the "commoners" on the shore that they were taíno, i.e., important people, from elsewhere and thus entitled to deference. If taíno was being used here to denote ethnicity, then it was used by the Spanish sailors to indicate that they were "not Carib", and gives no evidence of self-identification by the native people.[9]

According to José Barreiro, a direct translation of the word "Taíno" signified "men of the good".[10] The Taíno people, or Taíno culture, has been classified by some authorities as belonging to the Arawak. Their language is considered to have belonged to the Arawak language family, the languages of which were historically present throughout the Caribbean, and much of Central and South America.