It is entirely in my nature to respond as an educator on almost any topic, but the issues of race, ethnicity and culture continue to come up and I swear, I’m not doing all that much to further the issue due to force. These humble writings and thoughts are mine and this little website attracts only the intellectual and compassionate. [Insert big ass-kissing sound right here] Comments from my previous post were some of the most thoughtful I’ve ever read and there tended to be a confession of “I’m rambling now” when, in actuality, it helped give context to whatever comment or opinion was being made.
Huzzah to the ramblers!
Mostly what I learned from readers is that there is a sense of safety and respect for one another here and I have to say that I truly do try to cultivate that in my life. There was a time when a class came to me for English after getting reamed by their history teacher and I could tell there was no way any learning was going to take place unless we dealt with it. After they shuffled to their seats and sat looking at their feet I put down my book and asked, “What’s wrong with all of you? You look totally defeated.” It didn’t take long for them to tell me that they were yelled at and that they felt disgust at how they were treated. One boy, Adam, raised his hand and said, “Why is it that she keeps telling us that we WILL respect her and we don’t want to but we do respect you? What’s the difference? Why does she keep saying that she demands respect?”
This question, this true delving into knowledge was going to be my new objective for learning and I realized I probably would never get to that chapter of Corrie Ten Boom’s book The Hiding Place. Perhaps I could tie the two together in this lesson, I thought. Something about having respect for humanity and love and acceptance. I would give it my best shot because at this point I was teaching by feel.
“The difference, I believe, is that I don’t demand respect. I command it. Big difference.”
“What’s the difference? Demand? Command?”
Time to get out the dictionaries, kids. I never lose a teaching opportunity.
That’s what we did for that hour that one day. We looked up the difference between those two words and talked about how she made a peremptory request as if she had the right to be respected because she was older, more learned, or whatever reason she was attributing to her ‘respect’. I, on the other hand, knew that respect was a two-way street, an authority that comes after trusting them and getting them to trust me. If there is one thing I will say to new teachers getting ready to have their first set of fresh minds, it’s this: Don’t take respect for granted. You earn it, it is not afforded to you because of your position.
If for no other reason then do this: treat students like humans.
It is with this in mind that I’m writing something for BlogRhet this week. Heather reminded me of it today with a spirited exchange between a person who continued to question her in the comments section until I had no choice but to go there and make a comment myself. When people want understanding for matters of race, we have to leave behind our pre-existing notions. Matters of race can’t be left to the politics of just hair and skin. To be fair, it’s not even fair to use the “tacos and sombreros” approach to learning about another culture.
That reminds me: culture. (noun) - the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively.
When I tend to think of myself as a cultural person it’s probably due to a varied background that I was afforded and one that I feel truly lucky to have had. I grew up near the University of Chicago (in Hyde Park) where everywhere I turned there were people of different skin shades. My sisters and I attended a bi-lingual preschool and had an afternoon babysitter who was Hispanic who taught me how to speak Spanish. We went to a Catholic school when we got older and then did an after school program at the Jewish Community Center (which is where I learned the word schvartze so that later in life when I dated a Jewish guy and his grandmother called me that I knew it was a bad thing). It’s safe to say that my parents introduced us to a lot of culture.
Even still, I didn’t think we were all that different. If we went to dinner at a restaurant as a family there were always stares at my black and white parents and their black and white children. It wasn’t, as I look back on it, respectful at all. Perhaps it gave me a bit of a complex about people looking at me. Combine this with the times kids called me “oreo” or “zebra” or even “white nigger” but I can say with certainty that it never left a good taste in my mouth. Finally, I asked my mother why people always stared at us. She could have given me a lecture on Society and What People Think of Mixed Marriages and Miscegenation. Instead, she offered what a mother is supposed to offer:
“It’s because you and your sisters are so beautiful.”
What my mother did was introduce me to culture by allowing me the possibility that I could find beauty in differences, see similarities in one another that had nothing to do with our mere exterior casings, and gave me a sense of healthy respect for ethnicity and culture that wasn’t limited to that ‘tacos and sombrero’ approach.
She gave me something much meatier to chew on and digest. Thank you for that, Mom.