Black Koreans

Another funny work story --

Yesterday I had a class of 4th graders, real smart ones. We are doing a pen pal thing, so I printed photos of each kid to send to their pen pal, using the school printer. It's a lousy printer, so the pics came out with all these icky lines. Before I had showed the kids the photos, I told them that I could only print the pics in black and white because I don't have a color printer. Then, I told them that the quality came out poor because the printer is old, and warned them that the photos looked a little bad. And one girl looks at me and asks:

"Do we look like black people?"

Innocent question, right? In the moment, the humor of it didn't strike me, I just thought it was a dumb question. So I said, very patiently, No, you look like Korean people in a black and white movie. A few minutes later, I thought about her question, and could barely stop myself from laughing out loud. I mean, think about it -- black and white photos, bad photo -- in her 4th grade mind, that must mean . . . . they look like BLACK PEOPLE!!!

And this girl is not stupid either. Ok, she's a little spacey. But not stupid.

To her credit, Korea is a very homogenous country - not a whole lot of black people here, except in the area near the military base. Many of these kids have never seen a black person in real life. Probably the most exposure they get to black people outside of the movies is the politically correct, equal race representing American curriculum books we use at our school. But most have never actually seen, let alone known, a black person.

Whether that explains the ridiculous logic that lead her to ask that question is another question....