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Jan. 28th, 2010 11:38 am
You have to be carefully taught
My parents, in spite of their own shortcomings, did a decent job of raising us without any overt racial prejudice, to the point where I couldn't even wrap my mind around some of its cruder manifestations. I'm thinking in particular of the difficulty I had when I was younger comprehending the use of "black" as a slur. To me, race was an essentialist descriptive category, like "blond" or "broad-shouldered". Insinuating that someone was "black" when they looked "white" made as little sense to me as trying to make someone feel bad by calling them "short" when they were taller than you.
One incident which brought this into relief was a brief exchange I once had with a classmate back in junior high. I had given her the classic "Make me!" response to some exhortation or other and she came back with the equally classic "I don't make trash, I burn it!" Seeing as I was at a loss for a retort, she prompted me, "That's when you say, 'So that's why you're so black!'" At the time, I didn't read this as a racially-based insult. It seemed more-or-less equivalent to "You're so full of shit your eyes are brown!" which could be used against anyone, regardless of the actual colour of their eyes.
But in retrospect, it must've been. The girl in question was the most unreservedly racist of any in our school (small, parochial--in both senses--and 100% uniform in its racial compensation until the arrival of two Hispanic students my last year there). The one time I remember discussing "Black people" in class, her contribution to the discussion was "They look like monkeys!" (The teacher's reaction to this remark was to chuckle at it, prompting her to insist even more forcefully.)
A couple years later, in high school, a good friend told me about the "Three Big Lies" which--according to him--were "'Black is beautiful', 'The check is in the mail', and 'I won't come in you mouth'." Despite--or perhaps due to--not having really any context for the first slogan, I couldn't figure out what it was doing there. After all, I knew my friend wasn't a racist (since racists are bad people and my friend was good person, or else why would he have been my friend?) so there must be some other allusion there that I simply didn't get. No, not really.
One incident which brought this into relief was a brief exchange I once had with a classmate back in junior high. I had given her the classic "Make me!" response to some exhortation or other and she came back with the equally classic "I don't make trash, I burn it!" Seeing as I was at a loss for a retort, she prompted me, "That's when you say, 'So that's why you're so black!'" At the time, I didn't read this as a racially-based insult. It seemed more-or-less equivalent to "You're so full of shit your eyes are brown!" which could be used against anyone, regardless of the actual colour of their eyes.
But in retrospect, it must've been. The girl in question was the most unreservedly racist of any in our school (small, parochial--in both senses--and 100% uniform in its racial compensation until the arrival of two Hispanic students my last year there). The one time I remember discussing "Black people" in class, her contribution to the discussion was "They look like monkeys!" (The teacher's reaction to this remark was to chuckle at it, prompting her to insist even more forcefully.)
A couple years later, in high school, a good friend told me about the "Three Big Lies" which--according to him--were "'Black is beautiful', 'The check is in the mail', and 'I won't come in you mouth'." Despite--or perhaps due to--not having really any context for the first slogan, I couldn't figure out what it was doing there. After all, I knew my friend wasn't a racist (since racists are bad people and my friend was good person, or else why would he have been my friend?) so there must be some other allusion there that I simply didn't get. No, not really.