|
Edited on Sat Apr-12-08 06:49 PM by Bonobo
Until the age of 14, I lived in a very white suburb on Long Island that was predominately Italian, and which had no blacks, and almost no Jews.
Now, I am Jewish. I tell you that hardly a day went by without someone calling me "Jewboy" or throwing a penny at me and telling me to pick it up. Even many of the teachers were anti-semitic, I think. Still, I grew up not knowing anything different. I thought it was, well, if not normal, then normal-ish. The only black people we knew of were in the neighboring towns like Wyandanch, etc. It was a very segregated time and place. I don't want to tell you what my teammates would call those guys when we went against them in Football or Track and Field. Bad, bad names. Use your imagination.
Anyway, I never even spoke to a black person until I was 14, I think. That was when I moved to Skokie, Illinois. It was 1980 -the year the Nazis marched there. I had gone from being the only Jew, to being one of many, many Jews -but I never felt like I fit it with them. I suppose I internalized THEIR negative views of Jews in some way. I don't even want to particularly go there now, but suffice it to say that it gave me some perspective on being an outsider. A perspective that was later echoed when I lived in Japan for a few years. It is the feeling of being labeled by how you look or what your identity is, rather than your insides. And the thing is, even if you make "progress" one day, it is all gone the NEXT day when you get on that bus or train and have everyone stare at you or not want to sit next to you.
Anyway, back to the race story. I was in Skokie and went to Evanston to see an Eddie Murphy film. I forget which. Sitting in front of me was a skinny little black girl, perhaps 12 or so to my 14. When the movie was over and the credits began to roll, this girl stood up -prepared to leave. BUT, like some movies, this movie continued on THROUGH the credits with a lot of jokes or outtakes, stuff like that. The girl, however, continued to stand -the minutes passed. She would NOT sit down and I was now convinced she simply didn't want to embarrass herself by sitting down at that point.
Now here is the point where the story comes to a head. You see, I had only begun to think of race relations, and I assumed, or thought, that the best way to NOT be racist was to treat everyone the same way. So I said to myself "Here is a skinny little 12 year old and she is standing in the way of the film. I will tell her to sit down." So that's what I did.
"Hey, sit down willya!" I can hear myself saying. Nothing wrong with that, I thought. I felt like a pretty tough New Yorker then, surrounded by mild Midwesterners.
Do you know what happened? This girl turned around, ready to fight!
"You want to box with me?," she said.
"No, I don't want to box with you", I replied, shocked at the anger, the strange way of putting it, the oddness of having a skinny 12-year old girl challenge ME to a fight.
It took me a while to process the event and to come to a slightly more nuanced view on whether one could simply wish away racism by trying to be "color blind".
What is the point of this story? Well...maybe it is like art. maybe you will take from this that I am still a racist or a sexist or something. Those are the risks you take telling personal stories.
But for me, I am often reminded of this event when I hear some posters deny that racism plays a huge, huge part in this society. They also seem to think that to simply deny it is to make it go away. In societ and inside themselves. Well it's not. It's work like anything else to change your deepset ideas.
Make of this what you will.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
