Sunday, May 21, 2006
How to answer an ugly taunt?
Elizabeth Strother
Recent columns
- For those who have too little
- Time to gather mountain views
- Our blind spot on roads
- Following the money trail
From the RoundTable blog
T'aiya Shiner has it right.
How the community responds is a clearer statement than the muddled, hate-filled message of vandals who, just more than a week ago, spray painted racist, lewd, menacing graffiti spray painted in Day-Glo yellow and orange on the outside of Christiansburg High School.
"How we react is more important than the act itself," Shiner, the president of the Montgomery County Council on Human Relations, told a reporter soon afterward. "We support using this incident as a teachable moment to build understanding and respect."
I do, too. The lesson is best taught at home, but some people clearly don't get it. So it's up to those of us who are revolted by bullying and intimidation to speak out.
And that means publicly and privately, with friends and loved ones, the people whose affections we crave. Taking them on can be the toughest challenge. That and finding that tenuous balance between doing right and being self-righteous and knowing the difference when your best friends don't see it your way.
I recall an episode from my high school days, too many years ago, when one friend pulled another aside in the hallway to share a funny story and told me to walk on ahead. She didn't want me to hear because "you'll take it the wrong way."
Well, Barb relates her story to Paula, and the two of them howl with laughter. And, of course, I must hear the tale. I can't leave it alone until Barb agrees to tell me. But I have to promise I won't "take it the wrong way."
Yeah, yeah. Sure. OK.
This was a true story. Barb's fiance, John, a working man who was a few years older and out of school, was doing his laundry at a laundromat. It wasn't crowded. John was way in the back of the room, and a black woman was doing her wash toward the front. She had her son with her, a toddler, a real cute kid.
The little boy was toddling around and, friendly little fellow that he was, he made a beeline to John, then made a regular circuit between him and Mom. John didn't mind. He spoke to the boy as an adult does to a child just learning to talk, repeating simple words and phrases. And then a "brilliant" thought occurred.
"You're a n-----," John told the child. Over and over. And this innocent baby struggled to say this new word, one he could not know was a weapon meant to demean him on the lips of this white man.
That was my sickened reaction, anyway.
My friends howled.
And I was furious. "What a jerk!" I stormed.
Ah, yes, they said. That's why they didn't want to tell me the story. They knew I'd "take it the wrong way."
It makes me angry all over again, writing about it today.
I don't know what made me and my friends react so differently to this appalling incident.
We all grew up in suburban St. Louis, a segregated city, then and now.
Then, that meant I went to an all-white parochial elementary school, a fact that had everything to do with my mother's strict German Catholicism and nothing to do with the racial makeup at St. Michael's. As far as I know, no black Catholics lived in my parish, so none went to my school.
My friends went to public grade schools, though, which were integrated. Unlike me, they had black friends -- "school friends" only, of course, as they lived in different neighborhoods.
When I went to our public junior high school, I saw more black people on my first day than I had seen in all my previous days.
But without any "diversity training," an unheard-of concept at the time, I recognized John's meanness for what it was.
Now, the Montgomery County School Board is faced with an ugly incident and has to figure out how to respond. As a start, member Penny Franklin wants the board to have diversity training, and there can be no harm in that. But I suspect board members are far down the list of people who need it, and the people most in need of it are the least likely to benefit.
And in this instance, it will fail utterly to reveal what the community needs to learn about itself.
Three young men have been arrested and charged with multiple crimes, some of them felonies, and one of the suspects is black.
How perplexing. If they are guilty, what did they mean by their vandalism? And how do we counter it, not superficially but in a deeper way?
Commendably, all the school district's custodians scrambled to remove the graffiti the day it was discovered. But painting over threats and slurs will not remove the darkness they reflect from the hearts of people who hurl words like weapons. Nor will it remove the fear in the hearts of people who feel targeted by them.
People of good will, in the schools and in the community at large, need to step up and say: No. Not here. We don't think this way, and we stand together against any who do. Because we know wrong when we see it.
