On today's trip to drive my family of African refugee kids to tutoring, the kid sitting in the front seat noticed my library CD of Martin Luther King sermons, which prompted the following discussion:
First kid: Is this Martin Luther King?
Me: Yes.
Second kid: If it wasn't for Martin Luther King, you'd be a slave, Hamadi.
Third kid: It wasn't Martin Luther King who freed the slaves, it was Abraham Lincoln.
Second kid: It was both of them.
First kid: No, it was Harriet Tubman.
Fourth kid: Yeah, she freed the most.
[some further discussion about slavery]
Third kid: And did you know that in 1942, you could be killed if you were Jewish? It's because Hitler hated the Jews. You know Jews? Like, they invest money and get rich from it, which is why Hitler hated them, so he locked them up. And then they only got one piece of cereal a day.
Second kid: No, one piece of bread a day.
Third kid: No, one piece of cereal a day. Actually, one piece of cereal a year. That was all they got -- one piece of cereal a year.
Second kid: And one piece of bread a year too.
Third kid: Yeah, that's right.
. . . .
[some time later]
Fourth kid: I had this dream that all the black people were on a separate bus--
Third kid: Dude, that's racist.
Fourth kid: Okay, I had this dream that all the African-American people were on a separate bus . . . .
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