The Fable of the Sun People and the Ice People - non-racist version

Below is the original version:

[Story of the Ice People, and Sun People] Told by Dr.Umar Johnson

That story is an awful thing to tell children. It's racist, silly, and wrong. Here's my version:

***

Today, there are people spread over the world, but long ago, that was not so. Everybody lived in the same place now called Africa. It was mostly hot and dry, and people lived by hunting, fishing, and gathering wild plants. As time went by, there were more people, and so they began to spread all over the world: hot places, cold places, mountains, valleys, plains, next to rivers, by the ocean, and on islands. Everywhere they went, they came to have their own language and their own ways. But overall, people were mostly the same everywhere. There were good people and bad people, tall and short, smart and dumb, good-looking and ugly, and everything in between. 

The people who settled in Europe, we'll call them the ice people, because they had ice in the winter. The people who stayed in Africa, we'll call them the sun people, because it was sunny and hot there most of the time. As time went on, the people in both places switched from hunting and gathering to farming and herding. That meant more food, so soon there were more people in both places. The difference was that Europe was smaller, so it got crowded faster and people fought more. There was also fighting in Africa, but not as much because it was less crowded.

A few hundred years ago, the ice people started building big boats and sailed across the oceans to places all over the world. They were searching for more land to settle. The sun people did not build big boats because there was plenty of land already where they were. One day, the ice people sailed to the land of the sun people. By this time, the ice people had gotten very good at fighting, taking land, and bossing people around, so that's what they did to the sun people. Things went on like that for a very long time until there were some wars so big that the ice people finally got tired of fighting and let the sun people have their land back.  

Even though the ice people and the sun people still sometimes fight, most of them want to get along because they remember how bad things used to be. 

***

The above is also an oversimplification, but it's way closer to the truth than the original fable. 

The best story for teaching children about how racism is dumb and wrong is this:

Dr Seuss' The Sneetches Full Version YouTube