![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouRemember when I ranted about that horrendous adaptation butchering of Cooper's The Dark is Rising?
Sometimes I wonder where they grow the people who power the money that makes our movies and television and general pop culture. I mean, if you listened to these people, they'd have you convinced that if you are American, anglo, middle class, and raised in a generally suburban environment (give or take a few cows or transit buses), that you couldn't possibly ever want to spend money to look at someone who isn't also... American, anglo, middle class, and generally suburban.
Is this why we import so many actors from Canada, because they don't sound like they have an accent at all, to American ears? Because dogs forbid that the character have an accent, damn it, because that would be a strike-out on the first go-round. OMG, he's british! Oh, noes! Because apparently a mediocre American, white, middle class, suburban actor is way way better than a really awesome, NOT-American, possibly accented, non-Anglo*, and who knows for class or regional upbringing. Nope, let's go with the safe mediocre actor, because then the viewers can relate! Especially the children. Think of the children!
*shoots someone. possibly self*
If you're wondering, I specify 'anglo' instead of 'white' because there are places in this world that you can find pale-skinned people who at the same time do not have the facial build, structure, or mannerisms that would slide them easily into the American concept of 'white'. Hello, Bjork, anyone?
Hell, I recall Sweden and seeing faces that I knew immediately were not 'anglo' -- yeah, so the skin tone may be similar but that's the extent of it. However, I've also known folks who are strongly anglicized -- of mixed Native American heritage, or mixed immigrant heritage -- who may have skin more tanned or ruddy than mine but in all other ways, they are strongly stamped with 'anglo'. It's the face shape, the expressions, the build, the height, the hair style, the eyes, when they laugh and at what, the expression when thinking and the expression when angry. People don't realize, I think, that there's more to our interpretation of "like us" and "not-like-us" than skin color.
BUT ANYWAY.
Thing is, there is this racist kneejerk kickback that claims if the majority of the American audience is anglo (or anglicized), then the actors should be, uh, anglo -- which in America does almost always, no, wait, ALWAYS does default to "white".
I just don't get how these people, how anyone, can argue for the "only see someone like me" attitude as being universal (let alone that 'anglo' is the default setting for 'universal', but set that aside for a paragraph or so; I'll come back around to it). You may be able to argue it by regional group, or by age group, but I just don't think you can argue it as an unquestioned fact of human existence. No, I do NOT think "want to see those like me" is a default setting for being human.
I could ask, at what point did you realize people have different color skin, or speak with strange accents, or aren't all from the same place/culture as you, but it's not something most of us ever think about.
There's a term in philosophy that really applies here, called the "always-already". The idea is that upon becoming aware of a concept, and absorbing it into your world-view, you can no longer fully comprehend your mindset prior to that absorption: so it's as if you always had it in your head. Racism is an always-already for people: we're not raised with it, and we instead absorb it from the world around us, but having done so and usually by such subtle means, we're always-already racist, and we will forever be struggling to unring the bell.
It's possible you do recall the first time you became aware of skin color, and the first time you became aware that this came with a value judgment (if the two didn't occur simultaneously). Maybe the reason I do recall it, myself, is not an anomaly, though from what I've seen in my life, a highly unscientific poll seems to indicate being able to identify that moment is not the norm.
Or maybe what I need to do is rally up all the other former military dependents I know, get them to rally all the former military dependents they know, and lead a charge of a million diversity-entrenched military brats beating down the gates of Hollywood and bashing the heads in on these American, anglo, WHITE, middle class, suburban execs who think that children only want to look at pictures of themselves. (Reasons for that idea are below.)
Ahem. Okay, I can stay on topic. No, really! I know I've mentioned this before but I don't think at a great deal of length, so here goes, and I'll introduce you to my always-already.
I was not raised on base (mostly because my mother was, and she hated it), but my parents did almost always pick housing areas that were heavily populated by that strange swath of family-types in the South: middle-class military and academic families. Looking back at those years in the 70s, I don't think this kind of bias (which my parents commented on at the time in my presence, even if they didn't realize I was listening and puzzling over it) was necessarily a political thing -- the military does tend towards conservativism, while academia does tend generally towards liberalism-with-a-little-l, y'know, thinking for your self and the value of education and whatnot. In the Deep South of the mid-70s, people with higher degrees were in the same boat as people who'd only be around for two years (and most often were "not from around here") and thus both types got sequestered, often together.
In Atlanta, the neighbors across the street were first-generation Chinese; the father was a doctor & professor at Tech. Down the street were the Hispanic family who also had a grandmother living with them, like the Lees did, but that home spoke Spanish, not Cantonese. There were the military families, there were several black families, and I seem to recall an older couple who were first-generation Scandinavian immigrants, who also taught at Tech. Among the kids in my age group, I honestly can only vaguely recall one or two faces and those of my then-closest friends, but my mother's assured me that there was quite a mix of kids from all backgrounds. What we had in common were professor-parents, or military-parents, for the most part.
Then we moved to Montgomery, Alabama.
[Insert deep sigh of foreboding here. Before you ask, it was the least evil of three choices: my mother point-blank refused to move us to Fort Leavenworth NO WAY NUHUNH, and the other option was, hrm, somewhere in England or Germany. My sister and I were dying for overseas, but Mom didn't want us to suffer academically from being put in a local school, like in England, where we didn't know the history and weren't in our own grade because we had different educational background, and sixteen teams of wild horses could not have dragged her into allowing us to attend American School, on base -- because it's pretty much a given in the military that American School isn't really school, it's just a holding location for future juvenile delinquents and drug addicts, and has all the educational goodness of, oh, a freaking moldy marshmellow. And that, sadly, is how we got stuck with ALABAMA.]
You know it's a bad sign when you move into town and someone tells you the city's favorite joke: what's the best thing to ever come out of Montgomery, Alabama? Highway 85.
85 starts in Montgomery and travels through the bible belt to eventually end up in Richmond, Viriginia: two of the worst endings even if the middle parts hit some great cities.
Okay, so I was entering fourth grade. My folks had a modus operandi for transfer orders: they looked at the schools near the base. They'd find the best ones, then look for houses nearby that they could afford. I don't know if Montgomery had better schools elsewhere in the city's outer suburban ring, but I do know my mom was reportedly annoyed that real estate agents would only show her houses in two areas. Those, she was told, were "the best places for military families."
What did that really mean? Oh, it's code. It means "the best place to put people like you who won't freak to find there's a black family across the street, a hispanic family next door, and a Japanese family on the corner." For the record, the Japanese house in the middle of our block with the Japanese garden and koi pond was THE COOLEST HOUSE EVER and I wouldn't have traded it for a bazillion all-white neighborhoods if you paid me a dollar for every lawnmower.
Ahem, where was I? Right. I had my new school shoes, I got walked to the bus on the first day by Mom (after Dad hung out long enough to take pictures because that's WHAT YOU DO), and off my sister went to her first day in first grade, and I found my class for fourth grade and settled into a seat. Our teacher called us to attention; her name was Mrs. J, and she was a tall black woman with a build like a Navy nurse and although she seemed friendly, she was friendly in much the same way as a Navy nurse. All business and nice as long as you do what she says. Okay, I could handle that.
Then she said she'd be having us sit in assigned seats in alphabetical order. Mrs J calls out our names and points to desks and we each take our seats. I realized, she wasn't alphabetizing the kids. Well, not correctly.
Let me give you a visual. Let's say there are two rows. She'd started with the front left, then went to front right. Then second left, then second right. So it'd make sense that the arrangement by last name would look like this:
But the seating actually went more like this:
Being the idiot who couldn't keep a shut trap, I opened my mouth and pointed out to the teacher (after politely raising my hand, of course) that she'd not put us in correct alphabetical order. That there was a kid to my right who should have been two seats ahead of me, and the kid behind me should be to my right, that kind of thing.
Well, Mrs J didn't take this very well. She thought I had an attitude problem. I thought that was rather uncalled-for, and lost my temper and told her that I thought she had a alphabet problem, at which point she decided what I really had was a go see the damn principal RIGHT NOW problem.
So my very first day of school, I spent half the day sitting on the squeaky burnt-orange vinyl-cushioned public-school things that pass for sofas, in the hallway outside the principal's office. Which didn't bother me a huge amount, as any previous visits to principal offices had been short and brusque and "back to class with you", and besides, I'd taken my stuff with me, so I had a book. I just sat there and read, and... no one said anything, no chat with the principal, nothing. Lunch came and went, and the receptionist sent me to my other class, which was math/science. (Things didn't actually go much better with that teacher, either, but for entirely different reasons.)
The second day, I walked into class, Mrs J expected an apology now that I'd had time to "think it over," and I told her that I still thought she couldn't alphabetize, and I didn't see any reason I was supposed to apologize for pointing out what she'd done wrong.
BZZZT, kid. Back to the principal's office with you, and this time WE CALL THE PARENTS.
Now, a lot of you know that my mom and I have a checquered past, and Alabama was hardly a bright spot in our relationship. Yeah. Okay. But one thing I can say unequivocally about my mother is that she never, ever, EVER allowed anyone to call me stupid. EVER. Sure, you could have trouble dealing with reality (welcome to the childhood of ADHD before the diagnosis stretched past "kids who are hyper" into "kids who are mentally hyper") -- but that didn't make you stupid. And my mother would put up with a lot of grief from frustrated teachers, and did, for most of my school years, but the fastest way to get her to come over a desk and try to take out a teacher was for the teacher to say that maybe the problem was that I just wasn't very, well, smart.
Hooooo, boy. Mrs J didn't know what'd hit her. Mom was livid. Not only did she refuse to believe Mrs J's statement that I wasn't very smart and lacked manners (trust me, Mom beat those damn manners into me and my sister, but she'd also taught us to expect respect as much as we gave it, which was where I lost my temper, when a teacher didn't respect me in return). But when my mom finally got down to brass tacks and learned it was a matter of how the kids were arranged, she demanded to see the seating. If Mrs J was going to say I was retarded in some manner for not "getting" the alphabetizing and maybe I should be in a "troubled learner's" program, then Mom was going to demand proof.
Well, Mom took one look at the seating chart and said, "this isn't alphabetical!"
Now, it's not like the principal could really do much, when I think about it. The consensus, as I recall, was that Mrs J would stop calling it alphabetical, I would apologize to her for yelling at her (but not for saying she was doing it wrong, a point I very carefully made sure to phrase around and a finer detail my parents were fully supportive of, too, and I'm sure wasn't lost on Mrs J, either), and then we would carry on like nothing had happened.
Oh, yeah. Sure. How's that working out for you? HAH.
I ended up seeing a lot of the principal's office that year, and even the next one. The receptionists got tired of me sitting there swinging my feet, so apparently they figured the best punishment for Wayward Kid with Bad Attitude is... DUM DUM DUM... the library! Oh, noes! No, no, Br'er Fox, puh-puh-puh-pleeeeeese don't throw me in that there briar patch, puhleeeese!
Which was great, because I would kick up a fuss about something, get sent to the principal's office, they'd write me a pass, and off I went to the library. HOURS ON END. It was freaking bliss. Until the librarians noticed I was, uhm, there an awful lot and was, uhm, working my way through the entire Dewey Decimal system book-by-book. (Of course, it took them until halfway through my 5th grade year to put it all together.) That's when they took away my library privileges so I couldn't check out books -- yes! I was banned from taking books home! what the hell? -- but no one told the principal's office that, so they kept sending me to the library... where I'd read a book until time to go, at which point I would hide the book elsewhere in the stacks among, oh, the section on Life In Africa or Strange Ghost Stories or whatever, and the next day I'd go straight to the book, pick it up, and keep reading. HAH, take that you fascist librarians.
But I digress. (You knew it had to happen at least once.)
That's my major recollection about my fourth grade year, and most of my fifth grade year (among other things). Notice what's not in there? The awareness of just why Mrs J had alphabetized the way she did. It remained a mystery to me. I just thought the woman was retarded, personally, and too stupid to even realize it, and obviously (speaking as the child of a professor, here, can you tell?) she just needed someone to point it out because it's always better to know something you didn't know before, right?
*eyeroll*
At some point in that 4th grade year, there was a parent's night. We had our pictures and our test scores and whatnot up on the walls and whatever other decorations you do for parent's night, and we dressed up along with parents and it was this social thing in grades 4-6. My folks stood around and chatted (probably with gritted teeth with my teachers but hey, they're both Southern, they can fake those smiles), and met some of the parents of my classmates. Everyone stood around their kid's desk, I remember that; one of the parents turned out to be the aunt of one of my sister's classmates, so she and my mom were just chatting away all grooving and whatnot, since the woman's daughter and my sister were planning their very first sleep-over (so naturally the parents discussed household rules, food issues, etc). Blah blah blah blah.
Until my mom stops and says, "isn't your last name Fisher?" (Or some such.) And then goes to my classmate, "shouldn't your seat be up there, ahead of my daughter?" And then mom looks around at the parents and gets this funny look on her face, like she'd just eaten a lemon. I was like, oh, Mom's annoyed and next she'll get pissed at me, and I was all stressing, but she didn't. She just had this strange... look.
On the way home, she said something to my father about it. Yes, Mrs J had been arranging the kids alphabetically, all along. It was just that there was one thing missing to make that system make sense. The kids on the left were alphabetical, and the kids on the right were alphabetical. Yeah. Except.
The kids were first divided by race.
All the white kids were on the left. All the black kids were on the right. And then we had been alphabetized. The entire time I'd been arguing in this horrible daily stand-off with the teacher about alphabetizing, and my mother had been arguing alongside me, Mom had never once thought to ask, "what color are the kids?" Because Mom just didn't think that way -- the military had been segregated for most of her recollectable lifetime as a military brat herself, so diversity on base was just life as usual. That's how she'd raised me, and my sister, and the diversity among my father's collegiate professors, classmates, and students was pretty similar by that point to the life we lived as military folk.
But when Mom pointed out that the kids were different colors, I felt like... I recall being just absolutely flabbergasted, sitting in class and looking around me with these brand-new eyes. Not like I'd been stupid for not noticing before, but like I was being expected to see the world a certain way, and I'd never had to before, and nothing else in the rest of my life (being mostly consisting of socializing among academic and military, as sequestered as that can be) had ever prepared me for this information that other people didn't just 'see' color but that it mattered to them. Enough to be so completely bassackwards about alphabetizing a classroom's seating arrangements.
(It's not really that I didn't notice somewhere in there -- although still delayed, admittedly -- that kids in Row A were white, and in Row B were black. It was just that I automatically dismissed it as criteria for seat arrangements. Like, oh, an odd coincidence, because the issue was alphabetizing, and the teacher's version was screwy. Looking back, I guess I'd have to say it never occurred to my 4th-grade brain that color would be a factor, so I was up against this wall of "does not make sense" with no idea what I was missing.)
I recall that I tried to think in terms of, well, if going-by-color was okay (and I was just an idiot for not, like, knowing this), then why not just say so? Why make me feel like the idiot for pointing out the alphabetizing was all wrong? But both my parents were insistent that going-by-color was not right, that it was very wrong, one of the wrongest kinds of wrongs you can ever do to anyone ever ON PAIN OF DEATH AND OTHER BAD THINGS kind of wrong (later amended to include going-by-gender and going-by-religion and going-by-gender-liking).
Which did nothing for my brain: because if going-by-color was so wrong, then it made sense the teacher wouldn't want to admit she'd done so when messing up the seating arrangements... but why do it in the first place, then? Why do it at all? Did she not have parents to teach her that going-by-color was wrong?
And about that point I think my brain broke, because I realized, really realized: Mrs J was black.
Why, then, did she put the black kids at the back of the classroom and ignore them? If I couldn't get why an adult would go-by-color, I sure as hell couldn't get why an adult who'd suffer under that go-by-color rule would in turn... go-by-color. It just made no sense.
Yes, I did pretty much spend the entirety of my years in Alabama convinced the school system and its teachers and pretty much the entire socio-cultural atmosphere of that place were all completely and totally and unquestionably INSANE.
Those were also the years my mother started working outside the home again, and I'd go with her to sit quietly in the corner while she taught undergrad summer classes, and it wasn't lost on me that the only female professors in the department were not, in fact, full professors, and that all the men had their own offices with windows, while the two adjuncts (both female) were stuck in the storage closet. No, I am NOT making that up -- not that I complained, because psychology departments have nifty displays with BRAINS and stuff you can take apart like puzzles (which to my delight were always kept in the storage closet, woo!).
Well, until the (male) professors decided having women in the storage closet was too much bother, so they put both desks out in the lobby where the students usually sat while waiting for appointments. Yeah, that's right. Out there, in the open, shoved around and treated like nothing of any import. It was, I realized, a lot like the way my black English teacher was treating the black kids in my class: keep shoving them farther and father into the back and hope eventually they get tired of it and quit and then you don't have to deal with them anymore.
It's all the same.
That's why I don't really separate gender issues from race issues from culture issues. Those parts of us that are obvious on first meeting, our gender, our skin color, our accent, and the way that can relegate us to second or third or fifteenth place not because of what we did but just the genetic and cultural crapshoot that's life... man, it's all the same, and in one year I became always-already aware of it.
Mind you, it's not that I didn't, or did, see "color". That thing about "oh, I don't see color," being either a defense or a sarcastic comeback from PoC, no, to say that would be false. I was perfectly capable of seeing color. What I couldn't see -- and in my experience, what most kids to a certain age of indoctrination can't see -- is why it matters. I, we, they, see color. What we don't see is the value judgment that gets laid on top of it.
So if anyone ever has reason to say to me, "oh, the privileged Anglo can afford not to see color," I'd have to say that's absolute bullshit. In this culture, it's almost impossible to ignore color, because playing dumb (for good or ill) might be what gets you sent to the prinicipal's office enough times that when you leave they wish you a good day and that they'll see you tomorrow morning. And y'know, that really sucks after awhile. Besides, even people who are clinically "colorblind" can still see shades, enough to know that some skin is light while some is dark.
No, I think the difference is that I can refuse to put a value on this, that, or any, color. And it's not a matter of "can't afford to," because that's bullshit, too. What is this, am I secretly or unwittingly paying good-principle-taxes every time I open my mouth or even just think in my head according to the wisdom my parents gave me?
That women deserve every penny of equal pay for equal work and that being a Mom is just as much a job as any other job, and that it doesn't matter what skin color you have when it comes to being good at what you do (Booker T. Washington, people!!) -- or that gays & lesbians are not out to destroy your relationships but can be awesome friends and top-rate parents and are just as loving and deserving of respect as anyone else?
What, because I'm American, Anglo, middle class, semi-suburban, that I can pay this extra tax and respect people with decency -- ignoring that with one strike against me, I'm sort of on the borderline of being a marginalized group myself, say what. Wait, does that mean I can't afford to be like this, think like this? Do I not have enough, uh, I dunno, social capital to pay those decency-and-courtesy taxes?
Because I can't be the only one who sees the corrollary in that, when I look at the language upside down. That if this is an "innocent death," by implication there are "guilty deaths;" if this is decency I can "afford to give," then there must be someone out there who wouldn't be so decent because they "can't afford to." Sure, there are different ways to read the connotations of the phrase, but my literal brain can't help but follow the line out to a logical end, and cry foul. Decency shouldn't be something that you "afford" to do, like it's something you have to pay for. Decency should be free. It should be lack of decency that costs you.
Yeah, I know, it doesn't right now. And maybe it never will in the history of humanity, because we're always being discourteous and cruel about something. But we're getting better from where we were, and as long as we keep trying... right?
And right now (in this very moment and for what prompted me to even write this), if that means getting it through Hollywood's head that kids are quite capable of seeing "color" yet do not, in fact, "judge it" -- that for kids, color of skin is like accent-in-voice and anything else, it's just more of the world to explore and doesn't come with a prepackaged internal label that says Good or Bad or Indifferent. No, that judgment we most definitely learn from the adults around us.
Sure, if you want to appeal to my parent's generation (not my own parents per se but just the general Babyboomer segregation-issues-survivors techno-boom generation) then maybe sticking to "this is your color" is part of what those folks want in their pop culture -- because they do most definitely set values to certain colors, whatever those may be.
But for the kids? To hell with that. Give them all the color they want, give them as much as there is, throw it all in and don't set a judgment on any of it -- and I have to wonder, should those kids never have their own personal showdown with some bigoted English teacher determined to mangle the alphabet in the pursuit of soft segregation, whether the next generation won't possibly grow up with just a bit less bigotry in its always-alreadies.
A quick postscript: my fourth grade year, and the alphabetizing-drama (along with other equally upsetting conflicts of little major relevance here), were the impetus for my dad to have my sister and I tested, and we both got into MENSA. Shortly afterwards, my father swung by my school, in uniform and looking all spiffy, to so casually and helpfully drop off a copy of my MENSA membership. Just, y'know, to relieve the principal's mind about whether or not I was, y'know, STUPID or something. I'm sure he was all polite and whatnot, probably a combination of professorial and officerial -- likely introduced himself as Dr H, too, since the uniform spoke for itself.
I wasn't aware of that until the next time I ended up in the principal's office, and I remember she (yeah, she, imagine that) wanted to know why I had so much trouble in class if I was so smart. (Gee, Dad, plan backfired.) At any rate, I remember telling her only my sister & I had joined. It's only now that I think back and I wonder what the hell went through her brain when I explained that Mom said Dad didn't join because MENSA has like, a range you're supposed to belong to, and they wouldn't let Dad in because he was too smart. (For years, I really did believe that explanation. The crazy thing is that if it's possible at all, then it'd be true of my Dad.)
Heh. Yeah, I bet I know what was going through her head: PLEASE LET THIS FAMILY TRANSFER OUT OF HERE SOON, GOD. PLEASE.
hah.
Sometimes I wonder where they grow the people who power the money that makes our movies and television and general pop culture. I mean, if you listened to these people, they'd have you convinced that if you are American, anglo, middle class, and raised in a generally suburban environment (give or take a few cows or transit buses), that you couldn't possibly ever want to spend money to look at someone who isn't also... American, anglo, middle class, and generally suburban.
Is this why we import so many actors from Canada, because they don't sound like they have an accent at all, to American ears? Because dogs forbid that the character have an accent, damn it, because that would be a strike-out on the first go-round. OMG, he's british! Oh, noes! Because apparently a mediocre American, white, middle class, suburban actor is way way better than a really awesome, NOT-American, possibly accented, non-Anglo*, and who knows for class or regional upbringing. Nope, let's go with the safe mediocre actor, because then the viewers can relate! Especially the children. Think of the children!
*shoots someone. possibly self*
If you're wondering, I specify 'anglo' instead of 'white' because there are places in this world that you can find pale-skinned people who at the same time do not have the facial build, structure, or mannerisms that would slide them easily into the American concept of 'white'. Hello, Bjork, anyone?
Hell, I recall Sweden and seeing faces that I knew immediately were not 'anglo' -- yeah, so the skin tone may be similar but that's the extent of it. However, I've also known folks who are strongly anglicized -- of mixed Native American heritage, or mixed immigrant heritage -- who may have skin more tanned or ruddy than mine but in all other ways, they are strongly stamped with 'anglo'. It's the face shape, the expressions, the build, the height, the hair style, the eyes, when they laugh and at what, the expression when thinking and the expression when angry. People don't realize, I think, that there's more to our interpretation of "like us" and "not-like-us" than skin color.
BUT ANYWAY.
Thing is, there is this racist kneejerk kickback that claims if the majority of the American audience is anglo (or anglicized), then the actors should be, uh, anglo -- which in America does almost always, no, wait, ALWAYS does default to "white".
I just don't get how these people, how anyone, can argue for the "only see someone like me" attitude as being universal (let alone that 'anglo' is the default setting for 'universal', but set that aside for a paragraph or so; I'll come back around to it). You may be able to argue it by regional group, or by age group, but I just don't think you can argue it as an unquestioned fact of human existence. No, I do NOT think "want to see those like me" is a default setting for being human.
I could ask, at what point did you realize people have different color skin, or speak with strange accents, or aren't all from the same place/culture as you, but it's not something most of us ever think about.
There's a term in philosophy that really applies here, called the "always-already". The idea is that upon becoming aware of a concept, and absorbing it into your world-view, you can no longer fully comprehend your mindset prior to that absorption: so it's as if you always had it in your head. Racism is an always-already for people: we're not raised with it, and we instead absorb it from the world around us, but having done so and usually by such subtle means, we're always-already racist, and we will forever be struggling to unring the bell.
It's possible you do recall the first time you became aware of skin color, and the first time you became aware that this came with a value judgment (if the two didn't occur simultaneously). Maybe the reason I do recall it, myself, is not an anomaly, though from what I've seen in my life, a highly unscientific poll seems to indicate being able to identify that moment is not the norm.
Or maybe what I need to do is rally up all the other former military dependents I know, get them to rally all the former military dependents they know, and lead a charge of a million diversity-entrenched military brats beating down the gates of Hollywood and bashing the heads in on these American, anglo, WHITE, middle class, suburban execs who think that children only want to look at pictures of themselves. (Reasons for that idea are below.)
Ahem. Okay, I can stay on topic. No, really! I know I've mentioned this before but I don't think at a great deal of length, so here goes, and I'll introduce you to my always-already.
I was not raised on base (mostly because my mother was, and she hated it), but my parents did almost always pick housing areas that were heavily populated by that strange swath of family-types in the South: middle-class military and academic families. Looking back at those years in the 70s, I don't think this kind of bias (which my parents commented on at the time in my presence, even if they didn't realize I was listening and puzzling over it) was necessarily a political thing -- the military does tend towards conservativism, while academia does tend generally towards liberalism-with-a-little-l, y'know, thinking for your self and the value of education and whatnot. In the Deep South of the mid-70s, people with higher degrees were in the same boat as people who'd only be around for two years (and most often were "not from around here") and thus both types got sequestered, often together.
In Atlanta, the neighbors across the street were first-generation Chinese; the father was a doctor & professor at Tech. Down the street were the Hispanic family who also had a grandmother living with them, like the Lees did, but that home spoke Spanish, not Cantonese. There were the military families, there were several black families, and I seem to recall an older couple who were first-generation Scandinavian immigrants, who also taught at Tech. Among the kids in my age group, I honestly can only vaguely recall one or two faces and those of my then-closest friends, but my mother's assured me that there was quite a mix of kids from all backgrounds. What we had in common were professor-parents, or military-parents, for the most part.
Then we moved to Montgomery, Alabama.
[Insert deep sigh of foreboding here. Before you ask, it was the least evil of three choices: my mother point-blank refused to move us to Fort Leavenworth NO WAY NUHUNH, and the other option was, hrm, somewhere in England or Germany. My sister and I were dying for overseas, but Mom didn't want us to suffer academically from being put in a local school, like in England, where we didn't know the history and weren't in our own grade because we had different educational background, and sixteen teams of wild horses could not have dragged her into allowing us to attend American School, on base -- because it's pretty much a given in the military that American School isn't really school, it's just a holding location for future juvenile delinquents and drug addicts, and has all the educational goodness of, oh, a freaking moldy marshmellow. And that, sadly, is how we got stuck with ALABAMA.]
You know it's a bad sign when you move into town and someone tells you the city's favorite joke: what's the best thing to ever come out of Montgomery, Alabama? Highway 85.
85 starts in Montgomery and travels through the bible belt to eventually end up in Richmond, Viriginia: two of the worst endings even if the middle parts hit some great cities.
Okay, so I was entering fourth grade. My folks had a modus operandi for transfer orders: they looked at the schools near the base. They'd find the best ones, then look for houses nearby that they could afford. I don't know if Montgomery had better schools elsewhere in the city's outer suburban ring, but I do know my mom was reportedly annoyed that real estate agents would only show her houses in two areas. Those, she was told, were "the best places for military families."
What did that really mean? Oh, it's code. It means "the best place to put people like you who won't freak to find there's a black family across the street, a hispanic family next door, and a Japanese family on the corner." For the record, the Japanese house in the middle of our block with the Japanese garden and koi pond was THE COOLEST HOUSE EVER and I wouldn't have traded it for a bazillion all-white neighborhoods if you paid me a dollar for every lawnmower.
Ahem, where was I? Right. I had my new school shoes, I got walked to the bus on the first day by Mom (after Dad hung out long enough to take pictures because that's WHAT YOU DO), and off my sister went to her first day in first grade, and I found my class for fourth grade and settled into a seat. Our teacher called us to attention; her name was Mrs. J, and she was a tall black woman with a build like a Navy nurse and although she seemed friendly, she was friendly in much the same way as a Navy nurse. All business and nice as long as you do what she says. Okay, I could handle that.
Then she said she'd be having us sit in assigned seats in alphabetical order. Mrs J calls out our names and points to desks and we each take our seats. I realized, she wasn't alphabetizing the kids. Well, not correctly.
Let me give you a visual. Let's say there are two rows. She'd started with the front left, then went to front right. Then second left, then second right. So it'd make sense that the arrangement by last name would look like this:
| ALLEN | BROWN |
| CLARK | DAVIS |
| EVANS | FISHER |
| GREEN | HARRIS |
| JONES | KING |
| LEWIS | MILLER |
| NELSON | PARKER |
| ROBERTS | SMITH |
| TAYLOR | VAUGHN |
| WILLIAMS | YOUNG |
But the seating actually went more like this:
| ALLEN | DAVIS |
| BROWN | EVANS |
| CLARK | FISHER |
| GREEN | JONES |
| HARRIS | MILLER |
| KING | PARKER |
| LEWIS | ROBERTS |
| NELSON | TAYLOR |
| SMITH | VAUGHN |
| YOUNG | WILLIAMS |
Being the idiot who couldn't keep a shut trap, I opened my mouth and pointed out to the teacher (after politely raising my hand, of course) that she'd not put us in correct alphabetical order. That there was a kid to my right who should have been two seats ahead of me, and the kid behind me should be to my right, that kind of thing.
Well, Mrs J didn't take this very well. She thought I had an attitude problem. I thought that was rather uncalled-for, and lost my temper and told her that I thought she had a alphabet problem, at which point she decided what I really had was a go see the damn principal RIGHT NOW problem.
So my very first day of school, I spent half the day sitting on the squeaky burnt-orange vinyl-cushioned public-school things that pass for sofas, in the hallway outside the principal's office. Which didn't bother me a huge amount, as any previous visits to principal offices had been short and brusque and "back to class with you", and besides, I'd taken my stuff with me, so I had a book. I just sat there and read, and... no one said anything, no chat with the principal, nothing. Lunch came and went, and the receptionist sent me to my other class, which was math/science. (Things didn't actually go much better with that teacher, either, but for entirely different reasons.)
The second day, I walked into class, Mrs J expected an apology now that I'd had time to "think it over," and I told her that I still thought she couldn't alphabetize, and I didn't see any reason I was supposed to apologize for pointing out what she'd done wrong.
BZZZT, kid. Back to the principal's office with you, and this time WE CALL THE PARENTS.
Now, a lot of you know that my mom and I have a checquered past, and Alabama was hardly a bright spot in our relationship. Yeah. Okay. But one thing I can say unequivocally about my mother is that she never, ever, EVER allowed anyone to call me stupid. EVER. Sure, you could have trouble dealing with reality (welcome to the childhood of ADHD before the diagnosis stretched past "kids who are hyper" into "kids who are mentally hyper") -- but that didn't make you stupid. And my mother would put up with a lot of grief from frustrated teachers, and did, for most of my school years, but the fastest way to get her to come over a desk and try to take out a teacher was for the teacher to say that maybe the problem was that I just wasn't very, well, smart.
Hooooo, boy. Mrs J didn't know what'd hit her. Mom was livid. Not only did she refuse to believe Mrs J's statement that I wasn't very smart and lacked manners (trust me, Mom beat those damn manners into me and my sister, but she'd also taught us to expect respect as much as we gave it, which was where I lost my temper, when a teacher didn't respect me in return). But when my mom finally got down to brass tacks and learned it was a matter of how the kids were arranged, she demanded to see the seating. If Mrs J was going to say I was retarded in some manner for not "getting" the alphabetizing and maybe I should be in a "troubled learner's" program, then Mom was going to demand proof.
Well, Mom took one look at the seating chart and said, "this isn't alphabetical!"
Now, it's not like the principal could really do much, when I think about it. The consensus, as I recall, was that Mrs J would stop calling it alphabetical, I would apologize to her for yelling at her (but not for saying she was doing it wrong, a point I very carefully made sure to phrase around and a finer detail my parents were fully supportive of, too, and I'm sure wasn't lost on Mrs J, either), and then we would carry on like nothing had happened.
Oh, yeah. Sure. How's that working out for you? HAH.
I ended up seeing a lot of the principal's office that year, and even the next one. The receptionists got tired of me sitting there swinging my feet, so apparently they figured the best punishment for Wayward Kid with Bad Attitude is... DUM DUM DUM... the library! Oh, noes! No, no, Br'er Fox, puh-puh-puh-pleeeeeese don't throw me in that there briar patch, puhleeeese!
Which was great, because I would kick up a fuss about something, get sent to the principal's office, they'd write me a pass, and off I went to the library. HOURS ON END. It was freaking bliss. Until the librarians noticed I was, uhm, there an awful lot and was, uhm, working my way through the entire Dewey Decimal system book-by-book. (Of course, it took them until halfway through my 5th grade year to put it all together.) That's when they took away my library privileges so I couldn't check out books -- yes! I was banned from taking books home! what the hell? -- but no one told the principal's office that, so they kept sending me to the library... where I'd read a book until time to go, at which point I would hide the book elsewhere in the stacks among, oh, the section on Life In Africa or Strange Ghost Stories or whatever, and the next day I'd go straight to the book, pick it up, and keep reading. HAH, take that you fascist librarians.
But I digress. (You knew it had to happen at least once.)
That's my major recollection about my fourth grade year, and most of my fifth grade year (among other things). Notice what's not in there? The awareness of just why Mrs J had alphabetized the way she did. It remained a mystery to me. I just thought the woman was retarded, personally, and too stupid to even realize it, and obviously (speaking as the child of a professor, here, can you tell?) she just needed someone to point it out because it's always better to know something you didn't know before, right?
*eyeroll*
At some point in that 4th grade year, there was a parent's night. We had our pictures and our test scores and whatnot up on the walls and whatever other decorations you do for parent's night, and we dressed up along with parents and it was this social thing in grades 4-6. My folks stood around and chatted (probably with gritted teeth with my teachers but hey, they're both Southern, they can fake those smiles), and met some of the parents of my classmates. Everyone stood around their kid's desk, I remember that; one of the parents turned out to be the aunt of one of my sister's classmates, so she and my mom were just chatting away all grooving and whatnot, since the woman's daughter and my sister were planning their very first sleep-over (so naturally the parents discussed household rules, food issues, etc). Blah blah blah blah.
Until my mom stops and says, "isn't your last name Fisher?" (Or some such.) And then goes to my classmate, "shouldn't your seat be up there, ahead of my daughter?" And then mom looks around at the parents and gets this funny look on her face, like she'd just eaten a lemon. I was like, oh, Mom's annoyed and next she'll get pissed at me, and I was all stressing, but she didn't. She just had this strange... look.
On the way home, she said something to my father about it. Yes, Mrs J had been arranging the kids alphabetically, all along. It was just that there was one thing missing to make that system make sense. The kids on the left were alphabetical, and the kids on the right were alphabetical. Yeah. Except.
The kids were first divided by race.
All the white kids were on the left. All the black kids were on the right. And then we had been alphabetized. The entire time I'd been arguing in this horrible daily stand-off with the teacher about alphabetizing, and my mother had been arguing alongside me, Mom had never once thought to ask, "what color are the kids?" Because Mom just didn't think that way -- the military had been segregated for most of her recollectable lifetime as a military brat herself, so diversity on base was just life as usual. That's how she'd raised me, and my sister, and the diversity among my father's collegiate professors, classmates, and students was pretty similar by that point to the life we lived as military folk.
But when Mom pointed out that the kids were different colors, I felt like... I recall being just absolutely flabbergasted, sitting in class and looking around me with these brand-new eyes. Not like I'd been stupid for not noticing before, but like I was being expected to see the world a certain way, and I'd never had to before, and nothing else in the rest of my life (being mostly consisting of socializing among academic and military, as sequestered as that can be) had ever prepared me for this information that other people didn't just 'see' color but that it mattered to them. Enough to be so completely bassackwards about alphabetizing a classroom's seating arrangements.
(It's not really that I didn't notice somewhere in there -- although still delayed, admittedly -- that kids in Row A were white, and in Row B were black. It was just that I automatically dismissed it as criteria for seat arrangements. Like, oh, an odd coincidence, because the issue was alphabetizing, and the teacher's version was screwy. Looking back, I guess I'd have to say it never occurred to my 4th-grade brain that color would be a factor, so I was up against this wall of "does not make sense" with no idea what I was missing.)
I recall that I tried to think in terms of, well, if going-by-color was okay (and I was just an idiot for not, like, knowing this), then why not just say so? Why make me feel like the idiot for pointing out the alphabetizing was all wrong? But both my parents were insistent that going-by-color was not right, that it was very wrong, one of the wrongest kinds of wrongs you can ever do to anyone ever ON PAIN OF DEATH AND OTHER BAD THINGS kind of wrong (later amended to include going-by-gender and going-by-religion and going-by-gender-liking).
Which did nothing for my brain: because if going-by-color was so wrong, then it made sense the teacher wouldn't want to admit she'd done so when messing up the seating arrangements... but why do it in the first place, then? Why do it at all? Did she not have parents to teach her that going-by-color was wrong?
And about that point I think my brain broke, because I realized, really realized: Mrs J was black.
Why, then, did she put the black kids at the back of the classroom and ignore them? If I couldn't get why an adult would go-by-color, I sure as hell couldn't get why an adult who'd suffer under that go-by-color rule would in turn... go-by-color. It just made no sense.
Yes, I did pretty much spend the entirety of my years in Alabama convinced the school system and its teachers and pretty much the entire socio-cultural atmosphere of that place were all completely and totally and unquestionably INSANE.
Those were also the years my mother started working outside the home again, and I'd go with her to sit quietly in the corner while she taught undergrad summer classes, and it wasn't lost on me that the only female professors in the department were not, in fact, full professors, and that all the men had their own offices with windows, while the two adjuncts (both female) were stuck in the storage closet. No, I am NOT making that up -- not that I complained, because psychology departments have nifty displays with BRAINS and stuff you can take apart like puzzles (which to my delight were always kept in the storage closet, woo!).
Well, until the (male) professors decided having women in the storage closet was too much bother, so they put both desks out in the lobby where the students usually sat while waiting for appointments. Yeah, that's right. Out there, in the open, shoved around and treated like nothing of any import. It was, I realized, a lot like the way my black English teacher was treating the black kids in my class: keep shoving them farther and father into the back and hope eventually they get tired of it and quit and then you don't have to deal with them anymore.
It's all the same.
That's why I don't really separate gender issues from race issues from culture issues. Those parts of us that are obvious on first meeting, our gender, our skin color, our accent, and the way that can relegate us to second or third or fifteenth place not because of what we did but just the genetic and cultural crapshoot that's life... man, it's all the same, and in one year I became always-already aware of it.
Mind you, it's not that I didn't, or did, see "color". That thing about "oh, I don't see color," being either a defense or a sarcastic comeback from PoC, no, to say that would be false. I was perfectly capable of seeing color. What I couldn't see -- and in my experience, what most kids to a certain age of indoctrination can't see -- is why it matters. I, we, they, see color. What we don't see is the value judgment that gets laid on top of it.
So if anyone ever has reason to say to me, "oh, the privileged Anglo can afford not to see color," I'd have to say that's absolute bullshit. In this culture, it's almost impossible to ignore color, because playing dumb (for good or ill) might be what gets you sent to the prinicipal's office enough times that when you leave they wish you a good day and that they'll see you tomorrow morning. And y'know, that really sucks after awhile. Besides, even people who are clinically "colorblind" can still see shades, enough to know that some skin is light while some is dark.
No, I think the difference is that I can refuse to put a value on this, that, or any, color. And it's not a matter of "can't afford to," because that's bullshit, too. What is this, am I secretly or unwittingly paying good-principle-taxes every time I open my mouth or even just think in my head according to the wisdom my parents gave me?
That women deserve every penny of equal pay for equal work and that being a Mom is just as much a job as any other job, and that it doesn't matter what skin color you have when it comes to being good at what you do (Booker T. Washington, people!!) -- or that gays & lesbians are not out to destroy your relationships but can be awesome friends and top-rate parents and are just as loving and deserving of respect as anyone else?
What, because I'm American, Anglo, middle class, semi-suburban, that I can pay this extra tax and respect people with decency -- ignoring that with one strike against me, I'm sort of on the borderline of being a marginalized group myself, say what. Wait, does that mean I can't afford to be like this, think like this? Do I not have enough, uh, I dunno, social capital to pay those decency-and-courtesy taxes?
Because I can't be the only one who sees the corrollary in that, when I look at the language upside down. That if this is an "innocent death," by implication there are "guilty deaths;" if this is decency I can "afford to give," then there must be someone out there who wouldn't be so decent because they "can't afford to." Sure, there are different ways to read the connotations of the phrase, but my literal brain can't help but follow the line out to a logical end, and cry foul. Decency shouldn't be something that you "afford" to do, like it's something you have to pay for. Decency should be free. It should be lack of decency that costs you.
Yeah, I know, it doesn't right now. And maybe it never will in the history of humanity, because we're always being discourteous and cruel about something. But we're getting better from where we were, and as long as we keep trying... right?
And right now (in this very moment and for what prompted me to even write this), if that means getting it through Hollywood's head that kids are quite capable of seeing "color" yet do not, in fact, "judge it" -- that for kids, color of skin is like accent-in-voice and anything else, it's just more of the world to explore and doesn't come with a prepackaged internal label that says Good or Bad or Indifferent. No, that judgment we most definitely learn from the adults around us.
Sure, if you want to appeal to my parent's generation (not my own parents per se but just the general Babyboomer segregation-issues-survivors techno-boom generation) then maybe sticking to "this is your color" is part of what those folks want in their pop culture -- because they do most definitely set values to certain colors, whatever those may be.
But for the kids? To hell with that. Give them all the color they want, give them as much as there is, throw it all in and don't set a judgment on any of it -- and I have to wonder, should those kids never have their own personal showdown with some bigoted English teacher determined to mangle the alphabet in the pursuit of soft segregation, whether the next generation won't possibly grow up with just a bit less bigotry in its always-alreadies.
A quick postscript: my fourth grade year, and the alphabetizing-drama (along with other equally upsetting conflicts of little major relevance here), were the impetus for my dad to have my sister and I tested, and we both got into MENSA. Shortly afterwards, my father swung by my school, in uniform and looking all spiffy, to so casually and helpfully drop off a copy of my MENSA membership. Just, y'know, to relieve the principal's mind about whether or not I was, y'know, STUPID or something. I'm sure he was all polite and whatnot, probably a combination of professorial and officerial -- likely introduced himself as Dr H, too, since the uniform spoke for itself.
I wasn't aware of that until the next time I ended up in the principal's office, and I remember she (yeah, she, imagine that) wanted to know why I had so much trouble in class if I was so smart. (Gee, Dad, plan backfired.) At any rate, I remember telling her only my sister & I had joined. It's only now that I think back and I wonder what the hell went through her brain when I explained that Mom said Dad didn't join because MENSA has like, a range you're supposed to belong to, and they wouldn't let Dad in because he was too smart. (For years, I really did believe that explanation. The crazy thing is that if it's possible at all, then it'd be true of my Dad.)
Heh. Yeah, I bet I know what was going through her head: PLEASE LET THIS FAMILY TRANSFER OUT OF HERE SOON, GOD. PLEASE.
hah.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 19 Dec 2008 10:56 pm (UTC)It's the end of the semester and I am braindead and maxed-out on intellect, and right now I'm deeply tempted to munch on your tasty, tasty brains. So, uh, word.
no subject
Date: 20 Dec 2008 02:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 20 Dec 2008 05:28 am (UTC)(I'm actually of two minds about brain-nommings: are intellegent thinky brains more tasty to zombies, or would the unused brains of freshmen be all veal-like delicacies to the zombie hordes? My officemate and I were having a spirited discussion about this the other day, but we didn't reach a conclusion because we both had freshmen come in to grub for grades.)
no subject
Date: 21 Dec 2008 08:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 20 Dec 2008 12:16 am (UTC)I kept expecting a link to Hollywood's latest faux pas that catalyzed this rant.
no subject
Date: 20 Dec 2008 12:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 20 Dec 2008 12:19 am (UTC)I blinked at her and said, "Excuse me? Why would I hate you because of your skin color?" (I'm white.) "Your piss-poor attitude, on the other hand, sucks."
She ended moving out two weeks later, and to this DAY, I am still trying to figure out why I was supposed to hate her because she was black.
no subject
Date: 20 Dec 2008 02:23 am (UTC)What I didn't mention in the post was that for the next two years, I was ostracized by most of my classmates, with the exception of the (mostly white) military kids, who possibly may have been as out-of-water as I was, and the (black) local kids, who were fascinated and bothered by my refusal to play along with The Way Things Are. Like, that I just sat down on the bus and didn't notice that it was the self-proclaimed "black kids" section -- it was a free seat, so I sat. Cripes.
Well, mostly the black kids just insulted me and I just stared at them with no idea of what to do back, until they gave up and decided to get along with me. Probably that kindness we all have for people who are just a little tetched, y'know. *laugh*
no subject
Date: 20 Dec 2008 01:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 20 Dec 2008 02:25 am (UTC)The issue is, and should be, much larger than one fandom, even if that one fandom is an excellent stand-in for Hollywood's hypocritical cries about what we-the-viewers are willing to stomach & pay for.
(I mean, did they learn NOTHING from the blockbuster success that was Crouching Tiger? And that went into the theaters with SUBTITLES, people! It can be done, and it can make a million dollars at the same time!)
no subject
Date: 20 Dec 2008 01:48 am (UTC)However, in 7th grade, my social studies teacher tossed out a current-events question for discussion. "Should gays and women be allowed in the military?" And you got the usual runaround that 12-year-olds do... heck, I was paying so little attention that it took another few years before I clued in that homosexuality existed at all. But I DO remember that, after a long time letting us go at it, the teacher tossed out a second question that shocked me to the core. "Why are we discussing this as a single issue?"
Nobody had an answer. The teacher left us -- or, at least, me -- with the strong impression that he, and by extension correctly-thinking adults, authority, and the world in general, thought gay issues should be separate from women's issues. And that makes me want to go back and kick the man in the teeth.
no subject
Date: 20 Dec 2008 02:28 am (UTC)That was the whole justification, really, for putting Those Military and Those Academic and Those Not-White-Like-Us types all together in their own self-enforced and strongly-encouraged enclaves.
Of all the cities I've heard of, sometimes it seems like Chicago is the ultimate proving ground for a truly diverse city even when you get down to block-by-block, from what I hear from folks who've lived/grown up there.
no subject
Date: 20 Dec 2008 02:46 am (UTC)Of course, the bigotry I've run into in central Ohio is strongly drained off into football. Michigan as a whole is apparently evil incarnate for having Those Enemies Of OSU (unless you move here, then we're nice enough to pity you, you poor thing, being from Michigan) and I've seen classmates sent to the hall -- or, once, the coat cabinet -- for wearing The Other Team's colors. Maybe there just isn't enough energy or time left for mere racial bigotry after the football hate is finished with.
no subject
Date: 20 Dec 2008 02:53 am (UTC)My ex's family used to rearrange the living room on Homecoming/thanksgiving, so the sofa sat perpendicular to the television. It was the only way to prevent bloodshed after the year when two cousins took a touchdown just a little too personally, and the Mississippi State half decided to taunt the Ole Miss half of the family and WHAM the living room got wrecked and there was blood and it was BAD.
Again with being raised kinda out of touch of normality, though, because my father got his undergrad degree at UGA and then his grad degrees at GA Tech -- there's a rivalry for you. So when they'd play... he'd cheer for both. I grew up thinking that cheering for both teams was the polite thing to do, or something.
(Then again he used to make us promise at his reunions never ever to talk about where he went for his other degrees, so I don't know if most of his classmates to this day realized he'd come to Tech from UGA, or his UGA classmates know he went on to get additional degrees at Tech. Apparently this was one reason he'd asked the AF to pay to send him to Stanford, but they weren't going to pay non-resident fees for schooling... so we never got to live in Cali. Damn it.)
no subject
Date: 20 Dec 2008 03:07 am (UTC)*also applauds (belatedly) the Dark is Rising rant* So glad I have not wasted a penny seeing that movie...
no subject
Date: 20 Dec 2008 10:29 am (UTC)And then I realized it wasn't, and I cried, then I ranted, and then I blissfully forgot it ever existed. (As, apparently so did a million other Americans who did NOT go to see the movie. Nyah.)
no subject
Date: 20 Dec 2008 01:29 pm (UTC)I have this ongoing... disconnect with my roommate because she'll say the most prejudiced things and then point out that she treats individuals as individuals...
no subject
Date: 20 Dec 2008 05:09 pm (UTC)Don't get me wrong. I will say the most prejudiced things sometimes... but they're classist, not racist. Over the past few years, I've become aware of just how incredibly classist are some of my views, despite my mother's best attempts to avoid teaching those attitudes to my sister and me. She managed on a host of other things, but I'm afraid her mother managed to wriggle in a lot of classist viewpoints and I picked 'em all up. The fact that (for me) class is not predicated by skin-color doesn't change the fact that I still see, and react to, signs of class.
I'll probably spend the rest of my life trying to keep a smile on my face and not show annoyance when someone doesn't know the proper use of all the forks on the table, I guess. (Yeah, that can sound amusing, unless you're the recipient of such subtle annoyance, which I have been, so it's not like I'm ignorant of the effect.)
no subject
Date: 21 Dec 2008 03:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 21 Dec 2008 08:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 25 Dec 2008 05:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 20 Dec 2008 08:23 pm (UTC)The disciplinarian, who earned most of his pay separating kids from having knife fights in the cafeteria and barking lectures to full auditoriums about not using drugs, got a very why-am-I-getting-dragged-into-this look on his face, gave me a lollipop, and sent me back to class.
no subject
Date: 21 Dec 2008 08:40 pm (UTC)The only time I didn't get sent to the principal's office for arguing with my 4th grade math/science teacher was when I asked why science didn't have e-before-i. She actually admitted (for once) that she had no idea, and I was satisfied.
Man, nobody gave out lollipops at my school. Sheesh.
no subject
Date: 21 Dec 2008 06:21 am (UTC)I'm sure you learned more by reading in the library, anyway.
When I was 7 or 8, a new family moved into the neighborhood, living down at the end of the row closest to the bayou, down where most folks wouldn’t live because the houses flooded all the time. They had a pile of kids, a rusted-out pickup, some chickens, and a mighty collection of strange things in the front yard that the parents scavenged to sell for scrap. But the one thing that had the whole neighborhood talking was: they were white, and apparently hadn’t noticed that nobody else was, for blocks and blocks.
Now up until that time, I thought all Anglos could be classified into two groups: those who showed up at Christmas to pat us on the head and hand out school supplies, and those who drove by and threw beer bottles at us- outsiders who came through periodically, stirred things up, and then went back to their home planet- so I didn’t know what to think of these new people. But they never said or did anything to set themselves apart from us, never stopped their kids from playing with us, were always pleased and thankful when we took extra food or clothes down to them. What was more, they didn’t act as though this was anything out of the ordinary. By the time the family packed up and went back to Arkansas, two years later, I no longer thought of them as Anglos, but as neighbors.
It would be nice if I could say that experience changed my perceptions of all Anglos forever, but that’s not so. But it did show me that my stereotypes weren’t all that useful, and helped me start looking beyond the surface a little more. It started me thinking.
Somewhere I have a snapshot of one of the girls, an angel with creamy, freckled skin and a tangle of golden hair, wearing her favorite outfit, a frothy, sky-blue party dress with stained, ripped lace hems and safety pins for buttons in back. I winder where she is now.
no subject
Date: 21 Dec 2008 08:47 pm (UTC)Yeah, heh. CP asked me once if all that caused trouble in the family. It did, but (for once) it wasn't exactly aimed at me, so much as Mom arguing with Dad: Look what's happening, because we are STUCK in ALABAMA, and LOOK what it's DOING to our CHILDREN. I think she was making plans to move within a month of arriving, but she also had a policy of absolutely no mid-school transfers (which she had put up with, as a kid), so we only ever moved in June/July -- and at the end of the first year, there were no transfer orders b/c Dad had been passed over for promotion. He got it the following year and we were out of there SO FAST.
I don't think any one interaction can change our perception completely, or forever. But I do think such startlingly clear and important interactions set us up to allow our perceptions to be changed, by the next, and the next, and the next. Curiously, that's why I'm personally for the way some school districts will bus kids hither & yon to mix up the diversity in the schools, in terms of social class/income as well as subculture and native language and skin color: the more diverse the school, in my experience, the more powerful the experience.
Even if we don't realize it at the time.