The Personal Side of Bias, Prejudice, and Oppression

I have heard from some of my friends at play-dates saying we should avoid schools that many Latinos go to. When I heard that first, I didn’t know why so I asked the person the reason. She explained her belief that Latino people have low interests and motivations in education and have dubious morals. This bias diminishes the equity by implying that Latino students are not desirable and influence negatively on other students even though there is no such evidence and it may encourage Latino children to act like that only because other people expect them to do so. When I heard the explanation, I felt that it is not fair for Latino students because I believe there are going to be bad students in any ethnic and cultural group but they are not attributed to their ethnic or cultural groups except in this case.   And it is also weird that non-Latino people who do not really know much about Latino culture decided to label Latino students in this way.

I think the best way to turn this incident into an opportunity is for many Latino students to show their excellence in school. I think this is much easier than before because there are successful bilingual Latino youths and adults who can help younger Latino students. I also think teachers must not have these biases and prejudices against them because biases limit students’ performance levels and other students pick up the microaggressions from their teachers. Another thing we can do is that non-Latino parents can try to get to know Latino parents. I believe that they will find that parents in any culture usually think their children and their children’s education is very important.