I wasn't raised to be a racist. No one ever taught me that skin color variations changed the value or humanity of the person. "Caucasian" wasn't better or worse than "Hispanic" or "black" or whatever. Or, to borrow a phrase, I was taught that you judge a person by their character rather than by the color of their skin.
As a result, I had a mixed bag of friends in school. The two guys I spent the most time with were Dan, a Hispanic guy from Columbia, and Clarence, a black guy from Altadena. (Okay, Altadena many not mean as much to you as it does to me, but I get the significance.) We would get together at lunch or get together on weekends to take out our female friends on group "dates". Those who knew us called us "the United Nations" (not always with affection). But we didn't care. We were friends apart from skin color. And it has ever been thus for me. I don't care what ethnicity you may be. You're a person.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I encountered a little 6-year-old boy sitting next to me on a recent flight. I treated him like a little 6-year-old who might sometimes need help, not as a black kid who was a different skin color than me. "Do you want me to help you open your bag of pretzels?" I asked. When he went to the lavatory, his headphones fell on the floor, so I picked them up for him. I negotiated his favorite soda with the flight attendant. So I was completely shocked when he loudly exclaimed to his grandmother in the row in front, "Gramma! Tell this stupid white boy to quit messing with me!"
I want to know. Who has been twisting this kid's brain? Who taught him so young to judge by skin color? And why are there general assumptions that 1) all white people hate black people and 2) only white people can be racist? Was Martin Luther King Jr. dreaming only of changes in whites? These things disturb me.
5 comments:
That is sad. The child obviously didn't come up with that on his own. It is a learned attitude, fostered by adults and fed by folks like Jackson, Sharpton et al.
This is clearly a learned trait (since children of various colors don't seem to have problems playing together until they're taught otherwise). I suppose I'll just have to stop talking to people of color. Seems like a big step backward for race relations.
Stan, I've got to wonder how a good Calvinist like you could draw the conclusion that this little boy must have been taught to hate/disrespect whites. I don't doubt that he absorbed the attitude from somewhere, but - taking your example, for instance - it sounds to me like you were explicitly taught to judge a person by character rather than by skin color.
I've never bought the "South Pacific" argument that "you've got to be taught to hate". I think it helps quite a bit, don't get me wrong, but suspicion of folks of a different color and disrespect for one's elders strike me as perfectly natural behaviors which have to be ironed out of a kid by good parenting. Which, by the sounds of it, that little guy lacks.
On the other hand, I recently came home to see a little two-year-old toddling around on our sidewalk with a T-shirt that read: "I may be little but I already know my family is f****d up". From what I tried not to overhear, his (probably single) mother's vocabulary was predictable. One wonders when one should chew out a complete stranger for something like that. I simply went inside to be with my own kids.
The title, "The Innocence of Children", was tongue in cheek. I believe no such thing. And little kids don't need to be taught to hate. I agree. But to hate on the basis of skin color ... that doesn't normally seem to come naturally to little kids. They need to see it, hear it, have it modeled for them.
I will agree with you on this Stan. In my current neighborhood, my children and the only "white" children on the street. Funny thing, because one of my sons actually has a Choctaw roll number, but he is so white his older brothers call him a Sith (which he detests since he uses a BLUE light saber)! LOL!
My son plays with mostly girls (because that is what there is on our street in his age group), they are black and hispanic. None of them seem to know they are different from each other as they ride their bikes, play football, soccer, baseball, and Nintendo together...I hope it always remains that way.
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