The Lesson

Well, that didn’t take long.

Less than a day after the U.S. presidential election, school kids across America were already being taught some horrifying lessons about the kind of America the election of Donald Trump has legitimized.

On Wednesday afternoon, a grandmother posted on Facebook that her grandson, whose dad is from Puerto Rico (part of America, it should be noted), was told by a classmate that he would have to leave since “you don’t have an American name.”

That same day, middle school kids in Michigan were caught on camera shouting “build the wall” to Hispanic schoolmates in the cafeteria.

And Thursday evening, L.A. television news reported on a substitute teacher who had told students at a middle school in L.A. that, if they were born here but their parents were undocumented immigrants, they’d be able to stay but their parents would have to leave and they’d be placed in foster care. He then added insult to injury by telling them he could report them because he had their names, addresses and phone numbers. “It’s all in the system,” he crowed, not realizing that one of the kids was recording his comments on a cellphone.

That substitute teacher was fired, but comments like his have now driven LAUSD leadership to offer counseling to any student in the district -- a majority of whom come from immigrant or minority families.

These are not the lessons our children should be learning from an American presidential election. They should be learning the lesson that my sister-in-law Judy learned from her mother many decades ago.

Living in what was then a deeply segregated Boston, Judy asked Mom why the African-American cleaning lady who worked for them had brown skin. Mom told her, “That’s just the way she was born.” Judy pressed her: “But why?” “Some people have lighter skin, and some people have darker skin.”

Seeing the still quizzical look on Judy’s face, Mom took her into the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator and removed two eggs, one brown and one white.

Holding them up, she asked Judy, “What’s the difference between these two eggs?”

“One is brown and one is white.”

Then Mom took a bowl from the cabinet and broke the two eggs into it. She showed the contents to Judy and asked again, “What’s the difference between these two eggs?”

In my book, that is the only lesson children in any school in any community anywhere in America should be learning today.

If only.