FLAMINGO -CHINA.COM

I sat in the subway, feeling adventurous but anxious. Friends had cautioned me against taking the subway, especially to the Brooklyn area. A wall ad, which drew a sigh of relief, read: “To travel this fast above ground requires blue tights and red cape.” Indeed, the subway was the fastest way I could reach Brooklyn from Manhattan, for an appointment at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. It was only a week later, while I was watching a TV report on the Crown Heights riots, that I realized the seriousness of the situation that summer of 2001.
On August 19, 2001, a 7-year-old black child, Alvin Gives, was struck and killed by a driver in the neighborhood of Crown Heights, New York, USA. Later that day, a scholar, was stabbed to death amid a crowd of black youths seeking revenge. Black Americans, and Caribbean Americans live in the neighborhood of Crown Heights, very close to the Brooklyn Children’s Museum.
As soon as I reached Brooklyn, I saw men in long black coats and tall black hats. They had a particular hairstyle: long side burns, sometimes with along curly hair tail. Most of the older men wore beards. These were the Hasidic Jews, I thought.
Mindy Duitz, the museum director, confirmed this observation. The Brooklyn Childrens Museum was taking positive steps to rectify the hate and misfortune that had overcome the Crown Heights neighborhood. It was no longer safe for children to play in the streets. Children are now told to stay indoors and there is an atmosphere of fear in the neighborhood.
By gathering community groups to brainstorm on the steps and measures to understand differences, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum will be putting up an interactive exhibit to trace the history and relationships of the neighborhood’s 3 major racial and ethnic groups. Computers will be used. Children can trace their roots and those of others via the computer. They can input their own racial background and trace the roots of their ancestry. A similar exhibit in understanding racial differences is the “Kids Bridge” at the Boston Children’s Museum. Kids can tune in by watching a video and listening to a Korean or Indian child narrate about an incident where other children hurt his feelings. The video then asks the viewer, “What would you feel if you were in his place?”
This is one of the interesting features of a children’s museum. It helps the child comprehend events in his daily life in a non-threatening manner. Most of the children’s museums do not have such serious subjects as this. The more popular interactive exhibits include simple science experiments like the bubble-making tables, the sand pendulum, and simple machines and how they work. A crane, which the child can operate, has its mechanism exposed with Plexiglass as protection, to help the child figure out how the machine works. Cultural exhibits can be anything from guessing what an object is and where it comes from, to dressing up in a Thai costume to understand Thai culture.