(Today's title comes from South Pacific, with a little paraphrasing.)I know I have mentioned once or twice that I work in a moral sinkhole, as led by a Psycho who believes in nothing at all that anyone can see except for maintaining, preserving, and enhancing her own personal power. I can think of a few places where a person might work where this wouldn't necessarily be out of line -- organized crime, for example -- but in public education it seems out of place.
I have often felt weak and powerless in this environment, as if I am a cog in an evil machine, although I am confident that I myself do not perpetuate the evil. Yet the Psycho appears to have achieved a new level of evil, which I alluded to last week but never really went into. I did not witness this myself, but everyone else on the staff did because it happened at a faculty meeting last week on the day that I was out.
It appears that a statement was made which did not use any hot-button words or anything like that but which was clearly perceived by everyone in the room -- well over 100 people -- as racist. I am told that there was an immediate response by a few people who were not stunned into silence. Somehow the incident was later picked up on by students. Where this is going no one knows; the Chum says that the Psycho makes Bill Clinton look like he's made out of sandpaper. We've never seen anything stick to her yet, so maybe this won't either. Too soon to tell.
But I was talking to the Sibs about this yesterday in the car after we went out to dinner, and I was trying to explain how .... revolting this is. That was the word I came up with, and she was nodding. Exploding, I said "We were taught ... at the dinner table! that this is revolting!" and she laughed. Because Jack taught us his best lessons at the dinner table (5:00 pm, every night, 1946 - 2003) and although he talked about everything in a very calm and rational and intelligent manner, the one thing above all others that disgusted him was racism. Shirl did not teach in the same way, but was actually more passionate -- or at least, emotional -- on this issue than he was. To them, racism was the height of bad taste, bad manners. There was no quality they wanted to see in their children less.
My father did not use swear words ever, not since the war, but the words that he considered dirty (and so I will not write them here) were the ethnic slurs: the k-- word for Jewish people, the d-- and w-- words for Italian people, the m-- word for Irish people, the nasty little s-- word for Puerto Rican people, and most of all, the infamous n-- word for the people who were, in my childhood, politely called Negroes. Negroes, we were taught, was the proper word to use. "Colored" was the word my grandparents used, and although it had no negative connotations, it was old-fashioned, and not to be used by us. To refer to someone, or worse, address them directly as "black" was rude and crass. Such words were never heard in my house unless my parents were pointing out their use by someone else as a strong lesson in how not to behave.
So the Sibs and I were thinking this over, how carefully we were taught as children, and we remembered:
- That the very notion that skin color would have any impact on the abilities of any particular individual was absurd. My sister once reported at the dinner table that her swimming teacher had told her that Negro people couldn't learn to swim as easily as other people because "they have heavier bones." My father put his fork down on the table and looked across at her in silence for a moment. I think he was speechless. He just kept looking at her until she said "Oh! That's so ... stupid." And then he picked up his fork and continued eating.
- The story about my mother's first visit to the south, on their honeymoon to Florida after my father got back from the war. They got off the train in Miami and got on a bus to the hotel, and she saw Negro people being made to sit in the back of the bus. She had always lived in New York, lived in integrated neighborhoods, had friends regardless of such considerations. She sat on the bus and cried.
- My father had grown up in New England not far from New Bedford and Cape Cod, where all that whaling had gone on in the previous century, and as a result, there was still a large Portugese community in the area (and probably still us), a community that predated my own Jewish ancestors' arrival in this country by generations. There were also descendents of freed slaves still living in that area. (Legend had it that the one black man in Washington's boat in the famous Crossing the Delaware picture was from this town.) Anyway, so this town had a great many residents who gave the appearance of being "Negro " -- pick a word here -- but no one could really tell for sure and everyone was too polite to ask and for sure nobody treated them any differently, not in school or in business or on the street. One of these was the neighbor several years older than my father who treated him like a little brother and took him on the train to see the Red Sox play. This boy's mother was my grandmother's closest friend.
This town I live in, where I grew up and still live, was never especially racially diverse. It was the thing I hated about it most when I was a kid, and the reason I vowed I would never live here as an adult. (Yeah, well ...) It is becoming much more diverse these days, which apparantly was the trigger for the remark at the staff meeting, but it wasn't said in a "Well, it's about time!" kind of way.
It was said in a revolting way. How carefully was she taught?
(Please see melwadel's related entry here.)
