race, that mean race car ah?

I absolutely love Tan Hong Ming's facial expression at 1.12, and the subsequent actions that followed after he realizes that his crush is not such a one-sided affair anymore. As for the second video, I'm sure everyone was just as tickled when the Chinese boy had doubts about the definition of the word 'race'.

These clips were shown to us during a lecture last week and judging from the responses of the people in the lecture theatre, it was pretty much obvious that nearly everyone shared the same views about these clips. Yes, they're funny, cute, sweet, innocent, etc... but there's really more to these surface niceties. Other than the element of some light-hearted humour, here's what I took away from them (and of course, the lecture itself):

Kids are (so) much more open-minded than we think they are and we adults are the ones who's been putting edivisive ideas into their minds.

Strictly speaking, it's not quite accurate to say they're "colour-blind" (like what was suggested in the above two videos); especially since outward/physical appearances and imagery are things that catch their attention most easily at their age. What sets them apart from us adults is; unlike us who (typically like to) categorize/discriminate against people according to stereotypes based on skin colours, the kids don't carry out this sort of biased segregations. This non-execution is largely due to the fact that they are very much unaware of the idea of racial/ethnic (I'm using these 2 terms very loosely here) discrimination; and this 'ignorance' (of sorts) is exactly what we need to learn from these very young children. A child wouldn't mind playing with other children of ethnic groups different from hers; no prizes for guessing right who are the ones responsible for planting stereotypical views of different cultures in her mind. When we do things like that, we are not only severely limiting her view of the world, but we are also forming inaccurate and biased representations of the different cultures in her very un-corrupt and malleable mind -- reinforcements of these representations (by majority of the people who surround her) manifest to become ideas of loathing that will follow her throughout her life. How scary is that? What we are capable of doing...