Author Rukhsana Khan has talked in the past, though perhaps not in as much detail, about incidents of bullying and racist abuse towards her and her family, following their immigration to Canada from Pakistan. As Anti-Bullying Week in the UK draws to a close, and in the hope that by bringing such instances into the open they may never be repeated, we welcome Rukhsana’s guest post today.

By Rukhsana Khan:

When we first came to Canada from Pakistan in 1965, not only were we children bullied at school but my father, a tool and die maker, was bullied at work. Some of his fellow workers wouldn’t call him by name, they’d call him ‘black bastard’, and he put up with it because he had a wife and four children to feed. When we first arrived, he was making about $7 an hour. That doesn’t sound like much now but back then it was good money. However, within a year of buying our house in Dundas, Ontario, and my little sister and brother being born, he got laid off. He ended up accepting another job for $2.35 an hour. At the end of the month, after paying the bills, we had about five dollars a week with which to buy food; most of the time we ate dill weed and potatoes because it was cheap and filling.

We were the only Pakistani Muslim family in Dundas. The other kids in my class didn’t know much about brown people. When I was in elementary school the other children would tell me and my sisters that they were white because they were clean and we were brown because we were dirty. They said that if we went home and took a lot of baths we’d get white like them. So we tried it. We took five baths a day for about two weeks. When that didn’t work, we tried baby powder and finally, we stopped drinking chocolate milk for a while.

When I got to middle school things got so much worse. Suddenly it really mattered (more…)

Next week is Anti-Bullying Week in the UK, when school-children throughout the country will take part in activities to help them:

“grow up with their respect of self and others intact, be fine participant citizens and, perhaps most importantly, become peacemakers in their hearts.”

This quotation comes from Peter Yarrow’s afterword of a remarkable picture book of Steve Seskin and Allen Shamblin’s deeply incisive but simple song Don’t Laugh at Me. The words of the song have become increasingly familiar since first being written just over ten years ago: but set here with Glin Dibley’s hauntingly expressive illustrations, and with certain words in the text highlighted in red, even young children will be able to respond to it, using their innate sense of justice to pull out the essence of the song’s message.

Be prepared for taking your time over it: each line triggers all sorts of questions and discussion. Reading this book to your own children or to a class of young children is a beautiful way to introduce them to the notion that “difference” should make no difference. They will appreciate the juxtapositions in the illustrations, like the one of the boy in a helmet in a wheelchair – in that order: the wheelchair is actually the last thing you notice.

There’s also a cd at the back and kids of all ages will enjoy listening to the song, performed so gently and meditatively by the song-writers themselves.

Peter Yarrow, quoted above, founded Operation Respect and a percentage of the sales of the book goes to their “Don’t Laugh at Me” project… And there’s also a Spanish edition. Reading Zone has just placed it in in its Top Ten Picture Books. So what are you waiting for?