'What is racist?' Preschool director claims ignorance after parents upset by toddlers in blackface
A preschool teacher in Florida used blackface in a lesson on Black History Month, and the school's director claimed not to understand why parents were offended.
The teacher at Studio Kids in Little River covered the faces of three toddlers in brown paint and dressed one as a construction worker and another as a police officer, but it's not clear what the third child is dressed as in photos circulated by parents, and the content of the lesson also wasn't clear, reported the Miami Herald.
"This is racist," Courtney Poltis told Studio Kids director Patricia Vitale, according to a screenshot of their conversation.
"I'm sorry?" Vitale replied, and she again said she didn't understand when Poltis said other parents were concerned. "What is racist?"
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Vitale then sent out an apology message to all of the parents.
“We have not intended to offend anyone, and we are very sorry about any inconvenience,” Vitale said, according to screenshots shared with the newspaper. “The parents that know us, know that we have never had a bad intention in our institution.”
Poltis, who is Black, has already removed her children from the preschool, one of three operated by Studio Kids and which costs about $1,500 a month.
“You should know better as an educator,” Poltis told the newspaper. “What else are you teaching our children?”
Parents told the Herald the preschool was primarily Latino, and Poltis said the teacher who put the children in blackface was Latina, and an anthropology professor said that complicates the issue.
“One of the arguments Latin Americans make in defense of their anti-blackness is that it’s cultural or that racism doesn’t exist, that it’s a problem in the U.S. where there was Jim Crow segregation and not the same interracial nation building projects,” said Andrea Queeley, a professor of anthropology at FIU who studies Cuba, the African diaspora and race. “It is of course complicated but the historical, social, cultural and economic realities of Afro-Latin Americans suggest otherwise.”