here's an interesting comparison
Via delux_vivens, High achieving Lori Phanachone may be expelled from school because she refuses to take the English Language Development Assessment Test. School officials claim that she has to prove that she's literate by taking and passing that test. She's got a 3.9 GPA. (You can go read the whole article -- I'll wait.)
Compare this to my mother's experience. As many of you know, she and my grandparents moved to the US as refugees after WWII, when my mom was five. The immigrant experience was certainly no bed of roses for them (like the time their neighbor called Child Protective Services on them over a cultural difference in child-rearing, and my mom spent the rest of her childhood looking over her shoulder, terrified that she would be taken away from her parents.) But school? Her biggest problem at school was that her hair was too adorable.
Yes. Every day my grandmother would braid my mom's long, blonde hair into a crown around her head and top it off with a huge-ass bow to match her dress. No one else at school wore their hair that way. All the teachers would coo over how adorable and old-fashioned it was, and my mom just wanted to shrivel up and die. For her eighth birthday, the present she begged for was to be allowed to cut her hair. It broke my grandmother's heart, but she agreed, and my mom chopped her braids off and went with a pixie cut, and never looked back. (Whereas my grandmother kept those cut-off braids till the day she died; she showed them to me and told me the story when I was little.)
So, yeah, my mom ruthlessly censored her native culture to fit in at school, and she paid an emotional price for it. But there's a huge difference between standing out because the Powers That Be at school think you're cute, versus standing out because they think you're *illiterate*. I think that's a useful illustration of white privilege.
Compare this to my mother's experience. As many of you know, she and my grandparents moved to the US as refugees after WWII, when my mom was five. The immigrant experience was certainly no bed of roses for them (like the time their neighbor called Child Protective Services on them over a cultural difference in child-rearing, and my mom spent the rest of her childhood looking over her shoulder, terrified that she would be taken away from her parents.) But school? Her biggest problem at school was that her hair was too adorable.
Yes. Every day my grandmother would braid my mom's long, blonde hair into a crown around her head and top it off with a huge-ass bow to match her dress. No one else at school wore their hair that way. All the teachers would coo over how adorable and old-fashioned it was, and my mom just wanted to shrivel up and die. For her eighth birthday, the present she begged for was to be allowed to cut her hair. It broke my grandmother's heart, but she agreed, and my mom chopped her braids off and went with a pixie cut, and never looked back. (Whereas my grandmother kept those cut-off braids till the day she died; she showed them to me and told me the story when I was little.)
So, yeah, my mom ruthlessly censored her native culture to fit in at school, and she paid an emotional price for it. But there's a huge difference between standing out because the Powers That Be at school think you're cute, versus standing out because they think you're *illiterate*. I think that's a useful illustration of white privilege.