Required Presentations For the Month

Today, in school we had a presentation on race and ethnicity and an African American doctor came in with a slide show to try and teach everyone about the little things that their underdeveloped minds still can't fully grasp. Everything was fine and accurate until she started showing collaged clip art of different races and suddenly I was shocked and offended by the pictures chosen by this so-called professional to help portray the average white person.
The majority of the Caucasian pictures were completely normal people smiling and enjoying their lives, but the two that instantly got under my skin was first a throwback photograph of the Cleaver Family from "Leave it to Beaver" and then finally a stupefied scientist from what looked like a 1950's education reel, smiling with a cartoonish light bulb over his head.
Suddenly I felt uncomfortable in my own skin as I looked across the classroom and found myself at a loss for words. How could a licensed professional with a psychological medical degree pick such stereotypical pictures of the white race? It's almost as if she was saying that white people are still living in some hypothetical suburban family-friendly fantasy world where we're oblivious to what's really happening, frightened by communism and furthermore the inclination of a nuclear holocaust at any second.
I felt like screaming and criticizing her poor choices and furthermore calling her a racist for such a complete lack of effort to pick a legitimate photograph to represent the exact same idea. She could have posted a picture of Einstein or Kennedy, but instead it was two out-of-date and truly unsettling images of smiling and completely pleased phonies. I then suddenly lost track of all double standards and wondered how she would feel if I made a presentation and put up 1930's actors wearing black face. Oh, how this world still has trouble learning to breath on its own once under the deep and rumbling waters of a flood.