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rushthatspeaksSo all throughout the interwebs there have been many fine and intelligent and good people blogging against racism and making interesting and important points, all this week, and I have read these posts and found much food for thought, and then I have sat staring at my computer screen and very much not blogging, on the grounds that I find the whole subject confusing and difficult to articulate and other people tend to say the things I would like to say anyway, only they do it much more clearly and with footnotes and links.
But! I think I did think of something that is interesting, and possibly noteworthy, and that I'd like to compare notes on with other people:
I am white and was raised middle/upper/academic-class in the Midwest by liberal-moderate parents; I attended a diverse-but-tending-toward-Catholic Montessori elementary school and a very diverse Baha'i Youth Workshop during high school; and during my childhood, my teachers, mentors, parents (to some extent) and friendly authority figures all spoke of racism as over. As a thing that happened in the past, which was then progressed beyond, or if not beyond at least progressed so far into that the battle might as well be won. I was raised on heroic stories of the glory days of the Civil Rights movement, and Dr. Martin Luthor King Jr. was an American saint in my elementary school, along with George Washington Thomas Jefferson Ben Franklin Abe Lincoln and the rest of them. I was born in 1981. I know that I knew who Dr. King was by 1987, with the relevant dates.
No one ever sat me down and explained to me that this had all taken place only twenty to twenty-five years ago. That the sit-ins, protests, marches, that segregation and the restrictions I knew to be so backward and horrible were within the living memory of adults who were not all that old; that generations before mine had not necessarily had it taught them since birth that all of humanity are human. The 1960s, as a time period, went into my mental file with Prince Henry the Navigator and Catherine the Great and all the other dates one learns in school that are old beyond immediate relevance and whose influence cannot be traced directly but must be viewed as a trail through water.
Now that I am twenty-four, I am starting-- only starting-- to have some idea of how short twenty years could be for a society, let alone an adult human being. It is extremely conjectural. When I am eighty I expect it will be even shorter.
When I was born, the Civil Rights Movement was recent history: even now it is not too distant. And recent history is *relevant* history, because recent history will trip you up if you don't actually know it was recent. Or even if you do.
I know that I'm not the only one to have been raised this way, to think of racism as over and dead and gone and that battle fought, because the other kids of my socio-economic background in my workshop tended to feel the same way, whatever their races. (There were several kids of a distinctly working-class background involved in the workshop, too, and they tended to think the rest of us were being idiots when we talked this way.) We did a lot of anti-racism activism in that group, mostly through dance, and a lot of us didn't understand why it was necessary: we'd heard it so many times, surely it was beating a dead horse? We got lackluster about it. I was very focused on sexism those years, and on trying to get people to do something about that, and was rather single-minded politically; others had their pet theories; we were bored.
We went to a fair in a small town somewhere in the middle of nowhere to do a dance performance, and our dancers had tomatoes thrown at them from the crowd, and our resident interracial couple had stones thrown at them. (I wasn't present at either incident, but I helped clean up the tomatoes.) And when everyone went to the adult who was driving, terribly upset and confused and hurt, he sighed and shook his head and asked what we expected-- didn't we know that when he was our ages, we'd have been run out of town by a mob? He told us about being twenty in the Freedom Summer, and I said, but you're only fifty! And that's when it hit me: it's not over, and it wasn't that long ago, and the way things are now was not laid down by fiat by a whole lot of people suddenly coming to their senses. It was worked for and it is still being worked for.
And I think that something was wrong with the way I was taught about racism and about the history of this country, that I could have access to so many facts and yet not know that one. I don't know exactly what it was, or how to go about fixing it, and for all I know it could just be me and this one group of people I went around with in high school. But there it is.
How does this jibe with everybody else's experiences? If you were born after the 1960s, were you raised to think of racism as over? If you were born beforehand, do you see the younger generations being raised that way? Is it a white liberal thing? A middle-class thing? A Midwestern thing?
Where did this come from, that I could believe it until I was sixteen years old?
But! I think I did think of something that is interesting, and possibly noteworthy, and that I'd like to compare notes on with other people:
I am white and was raised middle/upper/academic-class in the Midwest by liberal-moderate parents; I attended a diverse-but-tending-toward-Catholic Montessori elementary school and a very diverse Baha'i Youth Workshop during high school; and during my childhood, my teachers, mentors, parents (to some extent) and friendly authority figures all spoke of racism as over. As a thing that happened in the past, which was then progressed beyond, or if not beyond at least progressed so far into that the battle might as well be won. I was raised on heroic stories of the glory days of the Civil Rights movement, and Dr. Martin Luthor King Jr. was an American saint in my elementary school, along with George Washington Thomas Jefferson Ben Franklin Abe Lincoln and the rest of them. I was born in 1981. I know that I knew who Dr. King was by 1987, with the relevant dates.
No one ever sat me down and explained to me that this had all taken place only twenty to twenty-five years ago. That the sit-ins, protests, marches, that segregation and the restrictions I knew to be so backward and horrible were within the living memory of adults who were not all that old; that generations before mine had not necessarily had it taught them since birth that all of humanity are human. The 1960s, as a time period, went into my mental file with Prince Henry the Navigator and Catherine the Great and all the other dates one learns in school that are old beyond immediate relevance and whose influence cannot be traced directly but must be viewed as a trail through water.
Now that I am twenty-four, I am starting-- only starting-- to have some idea of how short twenty years could be for a society, let alone an adult human being. It is extremely conjectural. When I am eighty I expect it will be even shorter.
When I was born, the Civil Rights Movement was recent history: even now it is not too distant. And recent history is *relevant* history, because recent history will trip you up if you don't actually know it was recent. Or even if you do.
I know that I'm not the only one to have been raised this way, to think of racism as over and dead and gone and that battle fought, because the other kids of my socio-economic background in my workshop tended to feel the same way, whatever their races. (There were several kids of a distinctly working-class background involved in the workshop, too, and they tended to think the rest of us were being idiots when we talked this way.) We did a lot of anti-racism activism in that group, mostly through dance, and a lot of us didn't understand why it was necessary: we'd heard it so many times, surely it was beating a dead horse? We got lackluster about it. I was very focused on sexism those years, and on trying to get people to do something about that, and was rather single-minded politically; others had their pet theories; we were bored.
We went to a fair in a small town somewhere in the middle of nowhere to do a dance performance, and our dancers had tomatoes thrown at them from the crowd, and our resident interracial couple had stones thrown at them. (I wasn't present at either incident, but I helped clean up the tomatoes.) And when everyone went to the adult who was driving, terribly upset and confused and hurt, he sighed and shook his head and asked what we expected-- didn't we know that when he was our ages, we'd have been run out of town by a mob? He told us about being twenty in the Freedom Summer, and I said, but you're only fifty! And that's when it hit me: it's not over, and it wasn't that long ago, and the way things are now was not laid down by fiat by a whole lot of people suddenly coming to their senses. It was worked for and it is still being worked for.
And I think that something was wrong with the way I was taught about racism and about the history of this country, that I could have access to so many facts and yet not know that one. I don't know exactly what it was, or how to go about fixing it, and for all I know it could just be me and this one group of people I went around with in high school. But there it is.
How does this jibe with everybody else's experiences? If you were born after the 1960s, were you raised to think of racism as over? If you were born beforehand, do you see the younger generations being raised that way? Is it a white liberal thing? A middle-class thing? A Midwestern thing?
Where did this come from, that I could believe it until I was sixteen years old?
