The original draft of this email was sent to the Washington Post’s Japan and Koreas bureau chief Simon Denyer, and copied to a few of his editors who, readers might conclude, seem more bothered by Japanese authorities’ imposition of conformity on their school children than by U.S. authorities’ comparable, if arguably more egregious efforts here at home.
Dear Mr. Denyer,
Perhaps you’ve missed the irony or, more likely, aren’t allowed to think or speak about it. But implicit in your front page story this morning, “Japan’s hair rules testing just how far schools can go,” is a subjective judgment that Japan’s mandated hairstyles for school children are somehow more onerous and harmful than are the mandated limits on thought and speech now routinely imposed on U.S. kids.
Maybe you can summons up the courage to suggest to your editors that, before worrying about what school kids a half a world away are dealing with, they might authorize an in-depth look at what may be, right here at home, the longer-term effects on developing children’s psyches of being taught that their skin color is everything, that whites are inescapably racist, and that the presence of pee-pees and wee-wees at birth means nothing: that all children should be free to choose their genders as they see fit, regardless of what their parents or “folks” or “guardians” might have to say about it.
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.