I was worried for a minute there. I spent lots of time at my last job figuring out how to make a classroom talk about race in a safe, meaningful, real way. I stopped and processed every racially charged statement I heard (over many moans and groans). I didn't allow the n-word in my classroom (or its shortened "friendly" counterpart which ends in an "a" rather than an "er" and is just as much of a problem). My argument was that by using it amongst friends you are keeping the word in the lexicon of your enemies. Why not just eliminate it from the American vocabulary altogether? I did a lot of arguing, and listening. I didn't even know what the goal was, really, except to be able to bring it up in conversation when it came up, rather than avoid it (which is what I usually wanted to do, if you want the truth.)
Anyway, I was worried because I still think the hardest conversations to have are usually the most important and I wasn't sure how they were going to happen at my new school. At my last school, with statements like "I'm gonna put her Puerto Rican hood rat ass back where it belongs" floating around the hallways, there were plenty of opportunities to say..."Um...can we talk about what you just said?"
But rich white folks' kids don't usually say stuff like that. They do this:
Last week, in Literature class with the youngest students, we were reading a story. The story's narrator is born and raised in Harlem, and talks, thinks, and acts like a person few if any of these kids have ever met. He hangs out at a barber shop and has tense relations with the police and thinks 18,000 dollars is the most money he's ever even heard of, never mind actually possessed. After reading the story, I asked the kids to point out some things they noticed.
"They are in New York."
"They are weird."
"They talk weird."
"They are, well he is...you know, everyone in the story is Afr- Bl-"
This poor girl fell all over herself trying to figure out how to say that the characters in this story were black. She wanted to use whatever the most politically correct polite words she could, but she had a very hard time figuring out what those were.
As far as I am concerned, this kind of freaking out while trying to talk about a person whose skin color is different from your own warrants a conversation as desperately as shouting racial slurs in the hallway. This is the problem our amazingly awesome Attorney General was talking about last week. We can't get past this if we can't talk about it.
Of course, it's not always easy knowing what to say. So I said two things:
"Are you trying to say that the characters are black?"
She said that yes, she was trying to say that but "she felt bad."
So I asked her why she thought that made her feel bad.
She couldn't really figure that out. But that's okay, at least she started thinking about it. I also tried to get from the kid who said everyone was "weird" why he thought that, but he didn't really know what to say either.
I think maybe she felt bad because if we had been reading a story narrated by a white person we probably never would have said, "Well I noticed that the narrator is white." Because isn't that the norm that we measure against? When a Christian pro-life wacko shoots an abortion doctor, he isn't a Christian extremist, but when a Muslim shoots someone, what do you think he's called? When Sarah Palin talks to a crowd of all white hockey moms, she's just talkin' to regular Americans, but when Barack Obama talks to an all black church group in Chicago he's playing to a special interest, right?
All this to say, I'm no longer worried about having big, scary, important conversations at my new school. Like everyone else, these kids see the world from where they are standing. And like everyone else, it would probably do them some good to look at it from different shoes once and a while.
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For whatever reason, this article made me think of your blog. Scary. The article is pretty damn frightening too. I imagine that the poll results would be a bit different there in Camelot.
Survey finds many Boston kids placing blame on Rihanna
The beat goes on
By Eva Wolchover | Friday, March 13, 2009 |
Hip-hop star Chris Brown’s arrest for allegedly beating singer Rihanna has sparked outrage in the media for weeks, but a survey conducted by the Boston Public Health Commission found almost half of Hub teens think she is to blame for the assault.
“Somehow young people have gotten the message that this is just part of a relationship,” said anti-violence advocate Deborah Collins-Gousby.
Of the 200 Boston youths (ages 12 to 19) surveyed last month, 51 percent said Chris Brown was responsible for the incident, 46 percent said Rihanna was responsible and 52 percent said both were to blame; 52 percent said the media was treating Brown unfairly; 44 percent said fighting was a normal part of a relationship; and a “significant” number said “Rihanna was destroying Chris Brown’s career.” Women blamed Rihanna as much as men did.
Prosecutors said Brown, 19, punched Rihanna, 21, repeatedly in the face, choked her and threatened to kill her Feb. 8.
“The story of Chris Brown and Rihanna may have happened 3,000 miles away, but it is very much a Boston story,” said Casey Corcoran, director of the commission’s Start Strong initiative, which conducted the survey. “We do know that teen dating violence or intimate partner violence cuts across all cultures, classes, genders.”
Corcoran said one in 10 Bay State youths has experienced some form of dating violence.
“The case provides all of us with an opportunity to have this conversation with the young people in our lives,” he said.
Experts say teens may be inclined to be sympathetic to Brown because of his popularity and the “normalization of violence” in pop culture.
“(Chris Brown) is or had been promoted as the kid next door, he was familiar and likeable,” said Collins-Gousby, who works for Casa Myrna-Vazquez, a Boston-based anti-violence organization that operates a 24-hour teen violence hotline and a citywide outreach program. “Among teens, I think their first reaction was, well, what did she do to deserve a beating that significant?”
But local teens interviewed by the Herald yesterday said they were shocked by the commission’s findings.
“How can they hold her responsible? That’s crazy,” said Michelle Oliverio, 19, of Boston. “It’s his fault. No matter what the fight was about, he still put his hands on a girl. He should be blamed for this.”
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