Message from cchin

[Anonymous]

In reply to this post regarding the book, Baseball Saved Us, first off...it is NOT about a Chinese boy in a Japanese relocation camp. The boy is Japanese American.

Also, be careful how you present this to a class because the book uses many racial slurs.

I was in class, subbing for an aid, and the teacher read this book aloud to her class of second graders. When the Americans in the book yell racial slurs to the Japanese during the game, the teacher asked the class if they knew what they meant by the name-calling. The teacher then shared racial slurs for different cultures, many of them based on the students in her class. She presented the names as words she never wants to hear on the playground. Unfortunately, I think it was too late, for name calling and racism are things that are taught, and she was surely teaching the wrong thing to these kids.