No More Hate, Hate No More
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I woke up scared on Election Day. And it has taken me some time to move into a state that is more productive than fear. On November 9th, needing something positive to focus on, we had a lunch-time chat (and raucous cheer!!) about how amazing President Obama has been, the only President my little charges have ever known. Some time after that we started painting our sign. |
At first I thought it might be a Black Lives Matter sign, hand-painted and proudly hanging in our front window. I'd been talking a lot about how poorly White People have continued to treat People of Color, using Jane Yolen's book Encounter to talk about Thanksgiving and the Dakota Access Pipeline. The week before the election I'd filled the bookshelf with stories of Black, Asian and Native American characters. I brought out some dual-language books and put all the White people away, with the exception of the 2 small board books I have with White same-sex couples.
As the week progressed this sentence formed in my head, "There will always be men and women who believe the oppressed deserve their oppression, simply because they fear their difference." I understood that the only way those of us who are oppressed can rise above oppression is if we are unified, not standing in our separate factions of oppression. And these words, No More Hate, Hate No More, allowed me to see a way that we could join forces.
It took us a while to figure out how to create our sign. I told them the words I had come up with and talked about how big a word 'hate' is. I told them I was taking that word out of my vocabulary, that all too often people used that word inappropriately to describe their feelings about winter, traffic jams, or feeling powerlessness. We threw ideas around together until JJ, age 4, said "Hate with an X through it" and off we went to the Art Studio. They asked "How do you spell hate?" and my heart sunk. It's a big word. Not one I'd planned to teach to those just learning literacy.
Creating this sign together was a solemn affair, each of us working independently, yet so proud of the cooperative end result. We hung it up out front and then pretended we were passers-by walking on the sidewalk, saying "lah-dee-dahh" as we strolled by, and then exclaiming excitedly when we came to a spot where we could see the sign. We moved it to a better location and repeated our "lah-dee-dahh" experiment, with continued excitement. Tao, age 4, made a stop sign for the entry gate so that anyone coming in or going out would have to stop and see our sign. No more hate. Hate no more.
As the week progressed this sentence formed in my head, "There will always be men and women who believe the oppressed deserve their oppression, simply because they fear their difference." I understood that the only way those of us who are oppressed can rise above oppression is if we are unified, not standing in our separate factions of oppression. And these words, No More Hate, Hate No More, allowed me to see a way that we could join forces.
It took us a while to figure out how to create our sign. I told them the words I had come up with and talked about how big a word 'hate' is. I told them I was taking that word out of my vocabulary, that all too often people used that word inappropriately to describe their feelings about winter, traffic jams, or feeling powerlessness. We threw ideas around together until JJ, age 4, said "Hate with an X through it" and off we went to the Art Studio. They asked "How do you spell hate?" and my heart sunk. It's a big word. Not one I'd planned to teach to those just learning literacy.
Creating this sign together was a solemn affair, each of us working independently, yet so proud of the cooperative end result. We hung it up out front and then pretended we were passers-by walking on the sidewalk, saying "lah-dee-dahh" as we strolled by, and then exclaiming excitedly when we came to a spot where we could see the sign. We moved it to a better location and repeated our "lah-dee-dahh" experiment, with continued excitement. Tao, age 4, made a stop sign for the entry gate so that anyone coming in or going out would have to stop and see our sign. No more hate. Hate no more.
