In the story “The Baby in the Airmail Box” of Thomas King, he has mentioned three main problems with a way of humorous and satire: the racial prejudice, the inhumanity of adoption’s policy and the irresponsibility of part of people. The purpose of the story is to criticize the racism, irresponsibility of part of people and the government.
The kid in the story was sent away as a commodity with no guarantee of safety, which shows the inhumane reality of the adoption policy, where the kid is sent just like an item for anyone. And in the final of the story, the inhumanity of law enforcement was pushed to its peak when the RCMP intervened in a Bingo game and only cared about whether the game was licensed or not, not the safety of the child. We can also see that the people in the council have not paid any attention to the child; they have made the baby the prize for the bingo game instead of sending the kid back or protecting it. Throughout the story, Bob represents the ineffective and messy policy of the government, as well as being a person full of racial prejudice. He constantly tries to refuse to let the Cardinal couple adopt a white child for many reasons, such as economics and education, to legitimize his racism, for example: when Mrs. Cardinal ask, “how do you discriminate?”; Bob have answered “Economics and education,”. This character and his racist acting remind me of the Emmett Till incident, which occurred in 1955 in the United States of America.
I was born in Vietnam, a country where racial discrimination rarely occurs, so I have never witnessed any acts of racism. However, my first impression of racism was when I was assigned an assignment to learn about these events. My teacher introduced the Emmett Till incident in 1955 to me as the content of my essay. I researched this incident carefully and was extremely shocked by what this young man had to endure: the brutal treatment just because of Carolyn Bryant’s baseless accusations and the terrible racism of many white people at that time. And the injustice is compounded when no one is held accountable for their crimes by an all-white jury. This showed me an alarming truth that anyone, regardless of age or gender, nationality or sexual orientation, as long as they are the target of prejudice, their life, honor, and dignity can be seriously threatened. I acknowledge that racism could include yellow people, black people, Indigenous people, or even white people, and an event like this could happen anywhere in every country. Fortunately, the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which lynching is recognized as hat crime was applied to ensure racial terrorism would never happen, and Human Rights were guaranteed.
The story “The Baby in the Airmail Box” of Thomas King not only criticizes the racial prejudice, the inhumanity of adoption’s policy and the irresponsibility of some of people in the story but also points out a fact that racism could happen in real life. The characters like Bob who have the racism in his ideology is the great example for my story about Emmett Till that racism could be a huge problem in reality and have led to painful consequence for victims. I realize that racism could happen in everywhere not just include only Indigenous people, even it may happen in my country but I have never know before. Therefore, people should unite to against the racism, prejudice to make society full of love and respectful