Really?

This is dedicated to sweet DW. While her little eyes have no business reading this, I hold out hope that it will be completely unnecessary when she is actually able to appropriate the message.

OK, so this blog post is a response to a "minor" verbal atrocity I became aware of this morning. I classify it as minor because no life or limb was taken, but read this for yourselves and then you decide exactly how small this event was.

A friend of mine has a little girl in preschool. She's a beautiful 4-year-old and is only a couple of days apart from Catie-Beth. She comes from a loving family and her father is an American Indian, which makes her 1/2 AI. Those of you who know me well, know that my grandfather was a full-blooded Lumbee from Pembroke, NC. and that makes me 1/4 AI. I am actually an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe and very proud of my heritage...all sides of it! Although I don't live in Pembroke, and have not experienced many of the prejudices that most of the elders and others in the community have lived through, I know enough to realize that the blinded eye of racism continues to give its fruitless glare to American Indians everywhere.

Now back to the story. Anyone who has a child or knows a child readily recognizes the fact that they'll occasionally have an off day and do things they probably shouldn't do. Sometimes parents get to hear about the events if they are particularly out of character for a child, and this is what the director of a school actually said to my friend about her daughter, "Your child's Indian temper and aggression are coming out lately." WHAT?! EXCUSE ME?!

Heifer better back that bus up! I am a southern-fried, pale-faced Native girl with an inner soul-child named Monifah, do you hear me? With a hand on my hip, finger in ya' face, head to the side and earrings coming off, I'm ready to rip her head off and I've never laid on the beast! I do know she needs to eat those words with a furious quickness though. How the director of a child's learning center could reasonably assign negative characteristics to the heritage of any student literally sets my teeth on edge. Jesus and all the saints, I would verbally lay somebody out for that in less than 2 seconds, and they'd be lucky if that's all I did! I only wish that I lived closer so that I could protest her facility and let all the other parents know how she really feels. I'm a put up or shut up kind of girl, and since she had the misguided guts to say such things, then she ought to have the guts to pay for them. I've had just about enough of these bullying-type incidents running rampant through this nation. This ignorant moron is perpetuating the seeds of racism and bullying in a freakin' preschool. I know that this might seem like a little thing to some of you, but it's the little things that take root and fester. This potato eatin' basket weaver won't stand for it though, and I sure as crap hope this story will serve as an eye-opener to how often American Indians get the short end of the stick. And for the love of everything holy, did she really have to do this at Thanksgiving? Putting a pitchfork in it, 'cause I'm done!

Discuss, respond, share. Thanks!