Perceptions of Inner-City 5-Year Olds!!!



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johnkarls
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Joined: Fri Jun 29, 2007 8:43 pm

Perceptions of Inner-City 5-Year Olds!!!

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When I was a sponsor of an “I Have A Dream”® program that served 200 kids in housing projects (please see “Background Context for John Karls’ essays), we decided before adopting our first group of 67 third graders to create a brochure illustrated with “kid art” for recruiting tutors and mentors.

The minister of the Baptist Church across the street from our first housing project was on my Advisory Board. Accordingly, he was requested to have all of the kindergarteners in his Sunday School spend one Sunday-morning class doing nothing but drawing what they would like to be when they grew up.

We received a wonderful group of 30-40 crayon drawings – nurses, teachers, firemen, chefs, etc.

But after we printed our first 1,000 or so brochures, we were severely criticized by the adults living in the housing project!!! They pointed out that every “kid art” drawing in our brochure depicted a white person!!!

We apologized profusely!!!

But then had the “brain storm” of going back to check the entire universe of 30-40 crayon drawings that we had received.

All 30-40 crayon drawings depicted only white people!!!

AT THE AGE OF ONLY 5, THE HOUSING-PROJECT KIDS ALREADY BELIEVED THAT THEY WERE NOT ELIGIBLE FOR THEIR DREAMS BECAUSE THEY WERE BLACK!!!

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