Tweet
The unbearable sadness of race
Franklin W Knight
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
When the Rogers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific first opened on Broadway in 1949, one of its controversial songs dealt with race. Across the Americas the problem of race, then as now, presents a peculiar obsession, although nowhere as inflexibly so as in the United States of America. South Pacific, like the original 1947 Harburg, Saidy and Lane stage play, Finian's Rainbow, tried to confront the then heated issue of racism in America. Then as now it was difficult to have an open discussion about race.
Franklin W Knight
Although the choreography overshadowed the words, the song, You have got to be taught, from South Pacific resonated through for the ages. "You have got to be taught/before it's too late/Before you are six, or seven or eight/ To hate all the people your relatives hate/ You have got to be carefully taught."
Race and racism are deeply woven into almost every culture. Some folks, however, are far more overt about it than others. Maybe one need not be formally taught to hate but the ambience in which one grows up preconditions one's view of the world. After all, education is more than just formal teaching in formal situations. One's views of the world are indeed shaped while one is young and impressionable, and often in the most informal ways.
President Barack Obama's easy rapport with diverse people reflects his unusually peripatetic youth as well as the careful instruction of his unusual mother. As the biracial Obama writes in his magnificent autobiography, he was schooled by his devoted mother in the early years while growing up in Indonesia. In that complex, multi-racial, multi-cultured country, the president of the United States recalls his young mother repeating that if he wanted to grow up to be a decent human being he would need some guiding values. Along with language, mathematics, and social studies, his mother impressed upon him the cardinal virtues of honesty, fairness, candour, and independence of judgement.
For this reason a story that came out of the state of Virginia started a train of thought on the insidiousness of race in the common culture of daily life in the United States. A newly registered six-year-old boy was asked on his first day of class to talk a little about himself. It is normal in early-learning schools, and the teacher probably expected some story about what he did during the past summer. Yet apparently the answer the kid gave was puzzlingly brief. He told the group that he had two grandmothers, one black and the other white. The story perhaps was meant to reinforce the idiotic assumption of some of the mentally challenged television talking heads that the election of Barack Obama as president of the USA signalled some miraculously hopeful new day in American race relations, a sort of post-racial America.
Since there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of the information, for children often tell unvarnished truths, one can only speculate about the mentality that produced such a remark or why it should have had more than local attention. If the report is to be accepted, should colour have been the first and maybe the only observation the child could have made about his grandparents? And why was there no information about grandfathers? Even more interesting, did this little boy arrive at this conclusion by himself or did his parents or others talk about it leading him to make that special observation?
One supposes that the grandmothers had other qualities that could have constituted part of the complex factors that impress themselves on the mind of a child. Were those grandmothers caring, generous, gentle, and affectionate? Were they short or tall, skinny or fat? Did they have occupations? Or could it be that, however unlikely, they shared all qualities equally and the only distinguishing feature was colour?
In Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean in general, one doubts that race and colour rank among the first attributes that come to the mind of a child. Across the Caribbean many small children would not find differences of colour especially significant because it is so commonplace. They probably take diversity for granted just as they assume that any sunny day will be hot. A hot day in the Caribbean is the norm so a cold day would be remarkable, even memorable. Precisely how any individual processes information, however, remains unknown in the social science literature. We cannot presume to know exactly why any individual does or says anything. Nevertheless, there are some things on which there is wide consensus. One such thing concerns the nature of socialisation.
Children who grow up in diverse communities normally take diversity for granted. Increasingly, the world is accepting diversity as it becomes more globally integrated. Nevertheless, what the world is just finding out has been the history of the Caribbean for centuries. The Caribbean has a long tradition of diversity of all sorts. While discrimination is a part of regional history, institutionalised segregation of the sort found in the United States of America and South Africa were never features of daily life. Caribbean people, therefore, tend to be less uncomfortable among groups that do not look like them. In Cuba the revolutionary state insisted on an equality of variegated phenotypes by invariably presenting children in diverse groups, thereby privileging no special kind of colour, ethnicity, or race.
The important point is not that children, even small children, should not be taught about the unbearable sadness of race, colour, ethnicity and class. They should. But these subjects remain the peculiar fixations of adults, not children. There will be time enough for such harsh realities as they get older. The world of children should be filled with unbridled fantasy where everything is possible for everyone. It should be a sort of Disney World without an entrance fee. Children instinctively know differences. And they also know that those differences need not be hierarchically arranged. Those are the sometimes vicious consequences of adult manipulations as they are carefully taught.
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/colum...SS_OF_RACE.asp
Franklin W Knight
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
When the Rogers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific first opened on Broadway in 1949, one of its controversial songs dealt with race. Across the Americas the problem of race, then as now, presents a peculiar obsession, although nowhere as inflexibly so as in the United States of America. South Pacific, like the original 1947 Harburg, Saidy and Lane stage play, Finian's Rainbow, tried to confront the then heated issue of racism in America. Then as now it was difficult to have an open discussion about race.
Franklin W Knight
Although the choreography overshadowed the words, the song, You have got to be taught, from South Pacific resonated through for the ages. "You have got to be taught/before it's too late/Before you are six, or seven or eight/ To hate all the people your relatives hate/ You have got to be carefully taught."
Race and racism are deeply woven into almost every culture. Some folks, however, are far more overt about it than others. Maybe one need not be formally taught to hate but the ambience in which one grows up preconditions one's view of the world. After all, education is more than just formal teaching in formal situations. One's views of the world are indeed shaped while one is young and impressionable, and often in the most informal ways.
President Barack Obama's easy rapport with diverse people reflects his unusually peripatetic youth as well as the careful instruction of his unusual mother. As the biracial Obama writes in his magnificent autobiography, he was schooled by his devoted mother in the early years while growing up in Indonesia. In that complex, multi-racial, multi-cultured country, the president of the United States recalls his young mother repeating that if he wanted to grow up to be a decent human being he would need some guiding values. Along with language, mathematics, and social studies, his mother impressed upon him the cardinal virtues of honesty, fairness, candour, and independence of judgement.
For this reason a story that came out of the state of Virginia started a train of thought on the insidiousness of race in the common culture of daily life in the United States. A newly registered six-year-old boy was asked on his first day of class to talk a little about himself. It is normal in early-learning schools, and the teacher probably expected some story about what he did during the past summer. Yet apparently the answer the kid gave was puzzlingly brief. He told the group that he had two grandmothers, one black and the other white. The story perhaps was meant to reinforce the idiotic assumption of some of the mentally challenged television talking heads that the election of Barack Obama as president of the USA signalled some miraculously hopeful new day in American race relations, a sort of post-racial America.
Since there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of the information, for children often tell unvarnished truths, one can only speculate about the mentality that produced such a remark or why it should have had more than local attention. If the report is to be accepted, should colour have been the first and maybe the only observation the child could have made about his grandparents? And why was there no information about grandfathers? Even more interesting, did this little boy arrive at this conclusion by himself or did his parents or others talk about it leading him to make that special observation?
One supposes that the grandmothers had other qualities that could have constituted part of the complex factors that impress themselves on the mind of a child. Were those grandmothers caring, generous, gentle, and affectionate? Were they short or tall, skinny or fat? Did they have occupations? Or could it be that, however unlikely, they shared all qualities equally and the only distinguishing feature was colour?
In Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean in general, one doubts that race and colour rank among the first attributes that come to the mind of a child. Across the Caribbean many small children would not find differences of colour especially significant because it is so commonplace. They probably take diversity for granted just as they assume that any sunny day will be hot. A hot day in the Caribbean is the norm so a cold day would be remarkable, even memorable. Precisely how any individual processes information, however, remains unknown in the social science literature. We cannot presume to know exactly why any individual does or says anything. Nevertheless, there are some things on which there is wide consensus. One such thing concerns the nature of socialisation.
Children who grow up in diverse communities normally take diversity for granted. Increasingly, the world is accepting diversity as it becomes more globally integrated. Nevertheless, what the world is just finding out has been the history of the Caribbean for centuries. The Caribbean has a long tradition of diversity of all sorts. While discrimination is a part of regional history, institutionalised segregation of the sort found in the United States of America and South Africa were never features of daily life. Caribbean people, therefore, tend to be less uncomfortable among groups that do not look like them. In Cuba the revolutionary state insisted on an equality of variegated phenotypes by invariably presenting children in diverse groups, thereby privileging no special kind of colour, ethnicity, or race.
The important point is not that children, even small children, should not be taught about the unbearable sadness of race, colour, ethnicity and class. They should. But these subjects remain the peculiar fixations of adults, not children. There will be time enough for such harsh realities as they get older. The world of children should be filled with unbridled fantasy where everything is possible for everyone. It should be a sort of Disney World without an entrance fee. Children instinctively know differences. And they also know that those differences need not be hierarchically arranged. Those are the sometimes vicious consequences of adult manipulations as they are carefully taught.
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/colum...SS_OF_RACE.asp