Mom Outraged After Teacher Forces Chinese Daughter to Sit Alone With ‘Foreign’ Food
A teacher was slammed after she allegedly targeted a young child, forcing them to eat their lunch alone after claiming the child was "distracting" the other children by bringing "foreign" food to the lunchroom.
A mom took to Reddit explaining she was furious with her daughter's teacher, resulting in her reporting her to the principal for singling out her child.
"My daughter is 6 and is in grade 2 but [has] only been remote until a few months ago so she hasn’t physically been in school for long," the woman wrote via Reddit. "Recently she told me she didn’t want her packed lunches anymore and wanted to eat what the other kids were eating. She had been not wanting to eat what were her favorite foods and opting for asking for pizza more."
When the mom asked her daughter why she didn't want to eat her favorite foods anymore, she was floored by the child's answer.
"She told me she wanted to be able to sit with the other students. I was shocked because I didn’t know she wasn’t sitting with the other students and she told me it was because her teacher made her sit in the other room by herself during lunch times because she brought 'smelly foods.'"
The mom noted that when she herself was a child, she was also "targeted by teachers" who didn't let her bring shrimp or foods with garlic or onion to school because they "hated the smell."
She explained she tried to shield her daughter from similar bullying, sharing she doesn't pack food "like spam, sushi, or egg fried rice."
"I was really upset because she is half Chinese, but she clearly looks Asian, and I felt it was my childhood trauma happening [to] her," the mom wrote, explaining she called the teacher to speak with her about the situation but received a conflicting story.
"I called up her homeroom teacher for a meeting and the teacher said they didn’t make her sit in the other room to eat but my daughter told me to ask her best friend who confirmed for me that yes she had been. Another teacher confirmed [they] had seen her eating alone and her homeroom teacher switched stories that she had but it was because my daughter brought a persimmon to school and it was distracting the other kids because they thought she was eating a tomato and she didn’t want her distracting the other students by having 'foreign' food."
The mom added the teacher "refused to believe it was inappropriate and said she didn't see anything wrong with sending her to eat by herself."
"I had to go to the principal and take my daughter to another homeroom to finish up the school year because that teacher said it only happened once despite my daughter swearing up and down it happened every few days for weeks before she told me," the mom continued.
Meanwhile, the woman's husband didn't believe his daughter, but she doesn't think he "understands because he is white."
Users peppered the comments section with support for the mom, with many slamming the teacher as racist.
"I'd file a formal complaint with the superintendent. This is racist and awful!" one person wrote, while another commented: "The teacher shouldn’t even be teaching if they’re going to discriminate and punish a kid just because she doesn’t have ‘Western’ foods. This will traumatize the kid and make her feel embarrassed of her own ethnicity."
"Even if it happened 'just once' that is way too much. This kind of thing is hard on kids," another person commented.
"Not only that eating with peers in informal time is a part of developmental growth and a teacher of young students should understand that," another weighed in, adding, "This teacher is racist and unqualified."