Project Mulberry discussion

Today in class my group had a really good discussion about the text, Project Mulberry.
When I was reading this book it really brought a lot to my attention. The one thing that stuck out to me was the issue of racism. The issue of racism was directed towards Julia's mother. The author flat out told the reader that Julia's mother doesn't like black people. I thought this was so blatantly thrown out to the reader. As I thought about my question that I would pose for my QTT paper I knew I wanted to make it a point to bring up the issue of racism in the text and how it affected Julia. I thought of the fact that Mrs. Song had the bad experiences with the black soldiers during the Korean War and if this caused for her racist views towards black people. It is never said to the reader the real reason for her mother possibly being a racist. Julia contemplates during the book why her mother feels this way and she really doesn't understand the reasoning behind these views that her mother has. It is hard for a child to hear that their parent has such distorted views about another race, especially when Julia's favorite teacher was a black woman and the man helping she and Patrick with their mulberry project was a black man. This issue was one of the main problems that Julia dealt with during the book.
We also raised the question about the politically correct way to address someone's background/ethnicity. The example in the book was when Mr. Dixon asked Julia if Chinese people used a lot of peppers in their cooking. He automatically assumed that Julia was Chinese and he made a snap judgment about her ethnicity. What is the best way to ask someone about their background? Is there a way to do this without offending anyone? Our group thought that possibly asking someone the question of, "What is your background?" instead of asking them "Where are you from?" The last question assumes that they are not an American citizen which can be offending to the person.
Overall, the discussion that our group had was very productive. I thought that the book was well written and raised many issues that could be addressed to a class. The author said in her note at the end of the book that she raised the issue of racism because she was hoping that it would help in the healing process that racism can have on a group of people. Discussing the issue is better than just trying to ignore and hope that it goes away.