Translating Predjudice

Two incidents this week left me thinking about language and the continued translation of predjudice.  We were talking at the dinner table about how Russia was going to take away drivers liscences from gay and transgendered people.  Joel made the joke that maybe Putin was worried that the gays couldn't even drive straight.  To which R, our six year old, asked why it was unreasonable to not allow people who could not drive straight to drive.  This led to a conversations about what straight meant in comparison to gay.

It struck me that we do this kind of translation a lot with our children.  S was doing homework converting inches to centimeteres.  I remember when she was little she was horrified that we called people with dark skin black, when they are obviously brown skinned.  This all got me thinking about how much predudice we keep around in our language as translation of older ideas and that makes it a lot harder to sweep the deck of lingering steriotypes and harmful ideas.  Will my children spend their lives coming back to me having to translate cause I am still  using old fashion(innaproproate)  language?  Or can we make a special effort to move our language along in order to let those ideas die a little faster?

Even that fact that she did not know what straight was, when they definately know what gay is was a reminder of how easy it is to slip into default mode of white, cis, male, straight, middle class.  That world that does not even need labels.

And again I am reminded that just because I am the teacher most of the time, sometimes the best lessons come when the children use what we taught them, even when it is embarassing.