'WHAT'S A KIKE?'
Today in class we were talking about sensitivity issues in editing: racism, sexism, ageism, heterosexism, etc. It's really interesting to see the things that jump out at this generation that wouldn't have jumped out at mine — things that they automatically assume are wrong that most people wouldn't have batted an eye at when I was a kid. For example, remember the story about the courtroom killings in Georgia where the defendant broke free from the deputy who was escorting him, stole the deputy's gun and proceeded to shoot several people? Most of the students seemed to agree that it was wrong to make a big deal out of the deputy's gender, to say in a headline, for instance, "Defendant overpowers woman deputy, goes on rampage." They felt her gender was irrelevant — just as irrelevant as her race or sexual orientation. A "man deputy" could have been just as easily overpowered, and some have been in fact, and no one would point out in a headline that it was a "man deputy." Plus, most students felt that her name identified her gender and that nothing else needed to be said; readers can draw their own conclusions.
In my day — not that long ago, but still — we probably wouldn't even have had that conversation about whether it was right, much less a consensus that it was wrong. I am heartened by this — mightily — especially because I often observe things in the classroom that make me despair, such as students calling things "gay" as a pejorative or displaying a shocking ignorance of history and geography — not having any idea who Susan B. Anthony was or Malcolm X, for example. Some students guessed on a quiz that Malcolm X was a rapper. Several identified the Nile as a river in South America.
And that's nothing new, I suppose. Teachers from the beginning of time have been lamenting the poverty of their students' minds. (I'm sure I shocked more than one professor with my own dearth of knowledge/sensitivity). It's not stupidity, I think. It's mostly a failure to read, to be proactive in their learning, to find out about issues, ideas, people outside their daily routine. They've had a lifetime of absorbing this and that from their public school teachers and this and that from TV and, for some reason, have not yet felt compelled to take their education — their minds — into their own hands.
Some of this ignorance I don't know what to think of. When my colleague was discussing the cartoon above, which came out during the flap over the depiction of Mohammad in European newspaper cartoons, I heard something shocking. One student turned to her classmates and said, "What's a kike?" None of the handful of people around her knew. They all stared blankly. One said, "I have no idea." I was absolutely floored, just as I was a few years back when a group of student journalists, after printing a picture of an African American playing cards with an overline that said "calling a spade a spade," professed to not have any idea that "spade" was a racial epithet for African Americans. They really didn't know, and maybe that's a good thing. Or maybe not. Does not knowing the word "kike" mean you are blissfully free of racist awareness, or does it mean you don't read, that you are out of touch with history, with culture?
posted by kc @ 10:10 AM
7 comments
7 Comments:
I was unaware of racism when I was a child. When I first heard of it, I was confused and couldn't understand where people got such ideas. (My parents never discussed race nor said anything remotely racist. I sort of wish they had talked about race problems so I wouldn't have been so naive.)
I probably didn't know the word "kike" until I was in my 20s.
My father is not racist, but he is a misogynist (less so than he used to be, however). He explicitly taught me and my brother that my mother was incapable of driving well because she is a woman. He also taught us through example that being verbally abusive to your wife is okay. He was allowed to treat her that way because he was the head of the household. He restrained himself around us, also. I found out years later that he was more demeaning toward her when we couldn't hear him.
And, of course, my father is homophobic. I don't know about him, but when I was a conservative Christian (as he still is), I was a "love the sinner, hate the sin" homophobe. One of those fundamentalists who thinks gays just need some therapy and support to overcome their sinful desires, like an alcoholic.
By the time I quit being a Christian, I had already figured out that religion was the only reason I was homophobic. I went from being against gays to being completely accepting instantly. I probably didn't seem accepting quite yet, because I was so ignorant of what it meant to be gay. (Well, you might say I wasn't completely accepting instantly, not just because I was ignorant, but because I still had some negative reactions to homosexuality. I just had too much of my life emotionally invested in hate. I'm over that now, though.)
Come to think of it, ignorance and naivety describe quite well my experiences with racism, sexism, and homophobia. Definitely when I was a Christian, but it's still so a little bit now. I've learned more in the past year about feminism than I ever knew before, and I still know next to nothing about it.
Thank you for this post. It has helped me think through a couple of things I've been needing to think through.
Sara, yes, it's probably a combination. I was trying to figure out how I came to know the words "spade" and "kike," and it must have been because I heard someone say it — and I'm ashamed to say it could have been someone in my own family — or maybe I heard it on "All in the Family," where Archie Bunker — a caricature of a bigot — regularly used such words, and I must have asked my mom what they meant. I'm sure she said something like, "It means a black person" or "It means a Jew" and "It's not very nice to say." I've heard it used in movies and TV shows like the "Sopranos."
Probably if I had asked her what "sodomy" meant, she would have said something like "it's a bad thing that you'll learn about when you grow up."
I remember when I lived in France and was 17 that a group of people — some of them 12 — thought it was hilarious that I had no idea what "69" meant. Not that this practice was widespread among French children, but it's a place where you'd naturally hear about that sort of thing pretty early because the culture is so much more sexually open than ours.
I read a lot, too, but I wish my childhood hadn't been so thoroughly white and middle class. We had a Jewish neighbor when I was a little kid, and all I found about them were cultutal stereotypes, probably because that's all my parents knew. I couldn't see any difference between that family and ours, and yet I learned — through sheer, mostly innocent ignorance — that there was something significantly different and vaguely inferior about them.
It's funny that in later life most of my mom's friends are from India and Africa and the Philippines — people she met at the store where she worked for decades — I wish it had been that way while I was growing up, when my mom worked at home.
My real dad, who did not raise me after I was 4, was a terrible racist and regularly said "nigger" in front of us.
Ben, your dad seemed so gentle the few times I met him that it's almost impossible for me to imagine his being an evangelical fundamentalist and all the negatives that usually entails, like treating women badly and being homophobic.
It's strange, and highly personal, how people develop their individual consciences. I became a real feminist the night a professor of mine at KU told me the story of how she had been raped and what happened later. It made me violently ill and sad. And still does. And it made me want to do something. I probably would have been a much longer time becoming a feminist had I not had that intense personal experience. And meeting people like my ex-husband and Rick, solid, matter-of-fact, liberal minded people, changed my life in ways I can't measure.
If I had to discover what I Iearned from these people in books, I'd be totally different now, I think. Or if I never met them. Wow. If I just randomly fell in with some other type of person. It's scary to think how impressionable we are in our environment until we develop our own minds and backbones.
Also, I meant to mention, that maybe you shouldn't use the word "Christian" so broadly when you mean "fundamentalist." A lot of Christians, despite what the Bible may say, form their consciences based on the spirit of Jesus, which is loving and accepting and life-affirming, and not on what idiots say.
I know. I understand that not all Christians are alike, but my indoctrination was so thorough that I still have trouble believing that non-fundamentalists can be "true Christians."
Yeah, but that's just another variation of "all X's must be Y."
Ben, did your church/parents REALLY teach you that Catholics and Methodists and Episcopalians and other mainstream Christians were not Christians? Did you think the 2,000 years of Christianity — the philosophy and art and history and martyrs and great cathedrals of Christendom (the most celebrated buildings ever built!) — that preceded the formation of your tiny evangelical congregation in south-central Kansas were just so much pagan bullshit? Honestly?
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