I found an online article based in Britain about a young girl arrested for racism. Codie Stott allegedly told her teacher in her science class a racist comment about her group that she was thrown into. Codie and her family were outraged. In the article, Codie tells the writer the real story that happened. Codie was out of school the day before the incident for a hospital appointment, so when she returned the next day she was behind in her school work. The science class had already started a project so Codie's teacher paired her up with 5 Asian pupils sitting at a table. Codie started to work with them and realized that only one of the five students could speak English. So when Codie had a question or wanted to give ideas, she had to tell the one student and then he/she had to tell the others. Codie could not understand them for they were speaking what she believed to be Urdu. Codie went to the teacher and asked if she could change groups because she could not understand the other students, but the teacher reacted by screaming at her and telling her she was racist. After Codie went outside to calm down, another teacher saw her, talked to her science teacher, then called the police officer that is stationed at the school every day. More than a week after the incident, Codie was arrested and was made to sit in a jail cell for three and a half hours. This young 14 year old girl now had a record, but was never charged. When she went back to school, she changed science classes, and is looked upon as an example to what could happen to you if you say something racist.
This article does not follow any specific thing that we have talked about, but I found it very interesting and very controversial. This article does have to do with racism and what is and isn't considered racism. Is refusing to work with someone because they don't speak your language racism? Before racism, there was only the difference between Christians and heathens. This then changed to the difference between whites and blacks. Is refusing to work with someone because they speak Urdu the next step to racism?
I feel that this is not racist at all. Codie just wanted to be able to do her work well. Since when was it okay to turn a student into a tutor unwillingly? I believe that if anyone else was in that kind of frustrating situation, we would all do the same thing too. The fact that the adults in Britain are taking this crack down on racism to the extremes, does not mean that they need to take it out on a child. The fact that the police and the teachers used her as an example is terrible. She did nothing wrong by wanting to further her education rather than hinder it and get a bad grade on her project. This over extreme form of anti-racism has got to stop as soon as possible.
(This information and the picture were found at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-410150/Schoolgirl-arrested-refusing-study-non-English-pupils.html)
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