A Black Boy, in a Black Sea, on a Black Night

"See how elastic our prejudices grow when love comes to bend them." -- from Moby Dick, Herman Melville

I'm going to get posters and T-shirts made that say: SPREAD AWARENESS, NOT PARANOIA. Catchy, eh?

We have already convinced our young people that a moment of sadness is reason for concern -- a reason to seek help and to fear a mental health crisis. As a high school teacher, I see evidence of this every day. 

[Usual disclaimer: Mental health issues are real and people should seek help for them, but crying for days because your dog died is not a mental health crisis; it's a healthy reaction to grief and it is something you should be able recover from in time. Knowing the difference is the key. If you can't recover from it -- or if your sadness is caused by nothing discernable -- then you are having a crisis. In the end: better safe than sorry.]

I think we have made people so "aware" of mental health issues that they are paranoid every time they feel a bit of ennui and every time they don't feel like getting out of bed to go to work. 

We have done this with race, too, I think. When I teach American literature, I usually show the Patrick Stewart Moby Dick film. And, every time I do, my kids lose their proverbial feces every time Starbuck delivers a particular line. 

Pip, the cabin boy, has stowed away on one of the whaling boats and is thrown overboard. They search for him into the night and, after an apparently fruitless search, Starbuck says: "We must be mad, lookin' for a black boy on a black night in a black sea."

At that point, invariably, ripples of shock run through my classroom. When I ask them why they reacted to that line, they usually make some reference to racism. 

Fascinating, isn't it? The facts are these: It is dark on the ocean; the sea appears to be roiling black silk and the boy they are looking for is Black. Therefore, he is hard if not impossible to see. He'd be hard enough to find in broad daylight. A white boy would be hard to find in broad daylight...in the vastness of the ocean. Take away the sun, paint the sea black and add darker skin, and it is a fact: It would be nearly impossible to find poor Pip. 

(They find him, miraculously.)

Racism? I think not. The students' reaction is one of fear -- of being paranoid as to what is okay and what is not okay to say. 

We want our kids to respect each other as humans, regardless of ethnicity, for sure. But have we drawn thicker lines between them with well-inteneded lessons of political correctness? Have our commercials and TV shows -- which paint a world of racial harmony that just does not exist in our society -- led kids to think that any acknowledgement of physical differences amounts to racism? 

I think so. 

Some might argue that if we are going to be paranoid, racism is the thing to be paranoid about. I understand that sentiment, but if it leads to more division, more distance between us, then that reasoning sort of backfires. 

Maybe it's another problem that lies within professing to be "color blind." When one person picks another to marry, I think the understanding is that the significant other is simply the best person one has ever known. This person is so incredible that one has chosen to spend the rest of one's life with him or her. Even under those circumstances, when people of different ethnicities marry (even when they are in the deep fathoms of love and respect) I woudl argue that the two are conscious of their physical differences. The key is that those differences are not part of any evaluative formula. 

Pip, my friends, was a fine lad. He was simply harder to see on a dark ocean than an Irish kid would have been. Nothing in that is prejudiced or racist. It's all about how we literally see color. 

Teaching Fear: PB&J and "Racism"

And, of course, it's on white bread.

I remember once telling a friend that someone we both knew well was "kind of a racist." Knowing that person to have been a good, friendly and sympathetic person, my friend said: "I can't believe he's racist -- prejudiced, maybe, but racist is too strong of a word..."

The friend who made that distinction was and still is strongly vocal against racism. He hates it deeply and has, occasionally, displayed this is pretty confrontational (and even violent) ways. But, still, he saw a distinction between racism and prejudice. Racism, he pointed out later in the conversation, is about hate and notions of racial superiority; prejudice is pre-judgement, based on stereotype.

This conversation happened decades ago. Since then, it seems the lines have been blurred or even erased.

Once, my younger son said something about having learned that Dr. King had spoken out against oppression of "black people." My older son said, "That's racist!" -- simply because his brother had said "black people." (Apparently, my son got the message that political incorrectness -- if indeed, "black people" is -- is the same as racism.)

This is what the tone of society's ideas about race has done.

I could go on about a number of things, including the continuing loss of cultural identities as a result; or, I could again write about the story of a black student of mine at Rutgers who wanted to be referred to as "black" and not African American, because his people had not come from Africa... But I won't.

I'll just reference this nonsense -- an article from a few years ago that a friend just posted. It's an article that tells about a principal who says there are "broader racial implications" that mean that a teacher should not use peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as an in-class example. As a result of some "equity training" the principal has recently received, she says:

“What about Somali or Hispanic students, who might not eat sandwiches?” Gutierrez said.... “Another way would be to say: ‘Americans eat peanut butter and jelly, do you have anything like that?’ Let them tell you. Maybe they eat torta. Or pita.”

She's right on one level and wrong on another. She's right in that this is a teachable moment. It gives a good teacher an opportunity to expand the cultural knowledge all of his or her students by asking good questions. But to imply that it is "racist" to mention peanut butter and jelly because some kids don't eat it is just asinine. And to carry that kind of an attitude is to breed linguistic fear -- the kind of fear that lead my older son to call my younger son a racist for mentioning the works of Dr. King in what he had been, somehow, conditioned to believe was "the wrong way." 

I can't believe people don't see what a culture of fear we are creating. It's a culture of oppressive pseudo-sensitivity. 

Child Wisdom from To Kill a Mockingbird

Jem and Scout, from the film starring
Gregory Peck

Somehow, I never read To Kill a Mockingbird until now. Go ahead. I'll wait until everyone is done lambasting me. [Looks at sky. Whistles. Bounces up and down on toes. Listens. Waits for a guy in Gdansk to get in his last barbed verbal missile.] But I'm glad.

Experiencing the book, now, as an adult, might be better than having read it, as many of our kids do in the U.S., in the eighth grade. I might have just chalked it up as a good read that I remembered fondly, had I read it then. Now, I am nothing short of in love with the book. As far as I'm concerned, it is just about a perfect novel.

That said, the book is sad, in lots of ways. But, most powerfully, it explores, through the eyes of children (eyes which, sadly, must be opened to such things), the general awfulness and superficiality of people. Of late, and as a consistent theme on Hats and Rabbits, the idea that society and groupthink are bad things has weighed heavily upon my disposition. I feel much as Jem must in this excerpt from the novel, after he and his little sister, Scout, witnessed the unfair trial of Tom Robinson, a black man in the white-dominated Southern town of Maycomb, in 1935. Scout starts:

NewSouth Books Censors Mark Twain

The world is full of short-sighted morons. You know that, right? Especially when it comes racial issues in literature. I was once evaluated, by a student in one of my college classes, as a racist. Why? I taught The Sun Also Rises, in which the narrator uses the "n" word; therefore, I was a racist for having chosen the book. Yeah -- slightly flawed logic.

A teacher I worked with informed me, today, that a librarian that he worked with in a school whose demographics were 100% African-American refused to have any book in the school library that contained the "n" word. While I get the sentiment, one wonders where that leaves, say, Richard Wright.