During my time working with kids I could identify some different traces of personality, which was related not only to the essence of the kids, but also connected to their environment (house, friends, relatives..) and when I had contact with their families, it was clear from where such behaviours and conceptions came from.
One day, we were in class and one of my pupils was causing some discomfort in the class because he was very talkative (he was a black boy), then I was chatting with another teacher about how he could not stop talking, suddenly, a little girl (white) said: "Nobody likes him because he is black", I was shocked and disappointed hearing that coming from a 5-year-old child and very embarrassed, because the teacher who I was talking to was a black woman; I replied: " This is not true, cuz the teacher is black and you all love her", the girl replied: "We like her because she is a teacher", I could not blame the little kid for such words, it was clear that so much of what they family thinks and says was reflected on those statements, that was sad!
Situations like those lead me to understand that it is a cultural thing, transmitted through generations, in a parents meeting I said once: "If you (parents) say that something is not good for your kids, they will believe it, it is the same about the school, if you say that the school has a poor learning quality, they will come to the school with a negative attitude towards it", the same happens when dealing with differences (colour, religion, nationality..)
Being deeper, I could say that it comes from how the characters in the bible are represented, for example, paintings showing always white people being the personification of purity, beauty, kindness and other virtues, while black people are put as inferior, dirty, demons and so... One dream of mine would be that in a movie or series about the creation of the man, they put a black Adam and a white Eve or vice verse, because this would speak volumes, think with me: how could exist two different skin tons? This would be amazing and a slap in the face of these narrow-mind racist (not to say something worse), but independent of the root cause of this mental disease, we need to fight against this prejudice, starting with people around us, avoiding racists jokes, behaviours and alerting family and friends about it, we are all humans and we deserve respect, cuz like my mom says: "We all were born the same way, our blood has the same colour and we all have the very same destiny".
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