Racism On The Playground

With April being National Poetry Month, spring is poetry season, and this spring, while reading through Childhood’s Favorites and Fairy Stories, an anthology collected back 1927 in New York, I found this little poem, “Foreign Children” by Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson (of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde fame):

FOREIGN CHILDREN

Little Indian, Sioux or Crow,
Little frosty Eskimo,
Little Turk or Japanee,
O! don’t you wish that you were me?
You have seen the scarlet trees
And the lions over seas;
You have eaten ostrich eggs,
And turned the turtles off their legs.
Such a life is very fine,
But it’s not so nice as mine:
You must often, as you trod,
Have wearied not to be abroad.
You have curious things to eat,
I am fed on proper meat;
You must dwell beyond the foam,
But I am safe and live at home.
Little Indian, Sioux or Crow,
Little frosty Eskimo,
Little Turk or Japanee,
O! don’t you wish that you were me?

First of all, ostrich eggs are delicious. Second, this poem just reminded me of the song I used to sing in elementary school with classmates, something that ended with “Chinese, Japanese, Indian Chief” while doing the slanty eyes with our fingers. More after the jump.

Since I was the only Asian heritage kid in the whole school, we had a conversation over whether I was Chinese or Japanese at all, trying to figure out why my eyes didn’t really slant up or down the way the little children’s chant explained. The passing on of playground culture has always been a thing of wonder for me, where kids pass down songs, chants, and games from generation to generation with almost no adult intervention, but I haven’t done enough recess duty to know what the current state of recess culture is like and whether or not such derogatory chants, games, or poems like Stevenson’s “Foreign Children” are passed down.

What I have noticed is that most of the kids I work with today are almost hypersenstive to the concept of racism. All you have to say is “Barack Obama is black” and you’ll be met with a slew of kiddy voices yelling “THAT’S RACIST!” So I imagine the “Chinese, Japanese, Indian Chief” song would be met with the same sort of whistle blowing? Has such derogatory traditions of playground culture finally met their end?