Hey, look! It's a black person!

I always wonder, 'what if God smoked cannabis?' and then I get my answer when I look at things like the platypus. That's not the reason I'm here, though. I'm here to inform you, yeah you three people reading this, of a recent experience.

So, I mentioned before about the bigoted and ignorant opinion of some Koreans. Now, I've seen it being implanted into the curious minds of children firsthand. And I had to teach it. So, the third graders are learning "What's this?" and "It's a _______." as their target language. One of the forays into this target language is a short video offered by the textbook CD.

You can guess the dialogue, but the context is what was jaw dropping. Gina and Rahul, the happy-go-lucky stars of our ongoing 3rd grade saga, go to the only black girl's house they've ever seen and start asking about what everything is, because it's all from Africa. First, Gina asks, "what's this?" about a cylinder that looks like a tree branch and Tina (our dark friend) replies, "it's a pen!" She then showcases the prowess of this tree branch by drawing, yes, a lion. It was probably the only animal she was exposed to in her tribe.

They then go on to ask, "what's this?" about this odd giraffe/monkey thing. Tina exclaims, "It's a cup!" and fakes like she's pouring some liquid AIDS into their cup or something. I wish I had a screen shot of how absurd her house looked. There was a tribal doll next to the bookcase, which was full of African junk. All sorts of earthy colors and zebras and the like. Really disappointing, Korea.

The effects of a homogeneous society at work, folks...