I read this bit here in yesterday’s Strib, about a mother’s reaction to racist grafitti in a north suburban high school:
St. Francis High School students reportedly discovered a racial slur scrawled on the wall of a bathroom stall more than a week ago, but many parents didn’t hear about it until Friday.
The message included the slur and incited students to hang three specific male students before the school year ends on Wednesday.
“It said they’re going to kill all of the N-words at the school and listed me and two of my friends,” said 17-year-old Anthony Stringer.
Stringer’s mother responded:
“What I really want out of this is for people to realize there are racial issues at the school. You don’t expect it to happen in 2008, but if it does happen, you expect the school to address it properly.”
And I started thinking: do we?
No, it’s not a slap at schools; indeed, they’re in an almost impossible position.
Bear with me for a moment.
When I was a kid in elementary and high schools, in the seventies, in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights movement, I remember everyone – schools, parents, the media, everyone – working overtime to beat into our heads that racism was a Bad Thing. The n-word was bad; skin color is not a person’s measure; don’t discriminate.
And although I grew up in one of the whitest places in the country (or at least one of the least Afro-American; while I grew up around a few Native Americans, Asians and Latinos, I didn’t actually meet an Afro-American person face-to-face until I was 16, and didn’t actually engage in a conversation with an black guy until I went to college), I think it largely worked; while I remember the odd racist joke when I was a kid, I think most people of my generation got conditioned to be very uncomfortable around the whole thing.
So I remember how uncomfortable it made me when I was working as a nightclub DJ, hearing the “N” word popping up in music.
And then as a pervasive element in urban pop culture – first in bits and pieces (the rap group “NWA” had to put the “N” word in code, abreviating it in their name, naming an album “Efil4zaggin”) and then more and more, bit by bit, until it rates just the most cursory “bleep” on MTV. If that.
And then as a part of fairly normal conversation in urban culture – in the store, on the bus, wherever.
And then to become an element of conversation – albeit carefully coded – in “polite” conversation; “the N Word” is virtually a word in its own right; white kids who try to act like gangsters are routinely (derisively?) called “W**gers”; some black people (including a caller to an internet talk show on which I’m an occasional guest) refer to Condi Rice or Colin Powell or other blacks who work within the conventional system as “HNs” in polite company, “House N****rs” elsewhere.
And then as an element of satire in a classic South Park episode.
Which leads us back to the Strib article.
Here’s the paradox: I’ve noticed that teenagers today are much more comfortable around racial diversity than when I was a kid (or so I presume). They’re also more aware of the effects of identity politics (consciously or not). And they’re also more comfortable with using the sort of language that makes a lot of people of my generation (of all races) blanche with discomfort, for the pure teenagery joy of…well, making people of their parents’ generation blanche with discomfort.
I see and hear teenagers of all races, in racially mixed company, blurting out “N***a” – just like DMX does on his records – for pure “comic” effect. It is brash, garish, naughty, makes people uncomfortable – everything a teenager could want in a word. Probably not much different than me singing “Anarchy in the UK” was for me in high school – “I am an antichrist, I am an anarchist, I know what I want and I know how to get it, I wanna destroy, multiply…” – a perfectly fine way to show the adults how much I wasn’t like them.
With teenagers – so many of whom are focused on getting attention, good or bad – it’s hard to tell what exactly is the right approach to take. Do you raise a huge stink and make your displeasure known – and, inevitably, give the act the attention that was the motivation for it in the first place? Or do you downplay its importance (and quietly and subtly punish it) to refuse to dignify it with the attention that the perps want so badly in the first place?
On the one hand, I think (and admit I could be very very wrong) that teenagers today are a lot more likely to “joke”, inappropriately or not, about race than I would ever have been comfortable doing. On the other hand, I think they’re vastly less likely to act on anything of the sort than the language might make one think.
Which, if I’m right (who knows?) is either a very good thing, or a very bad one.
Or both.
I have no idea.
And either, I suspect, do the schools, with their principals and teachers and superintendents who are more or less my age, who have kids with more or less the same pathologies, and run buildings full of kids with all of them and much much more.
Conclusion? I have no idea.
Here’s an idea: don’t put a school into full-on panic mode because someone wrote a racially hatefull thing in a restroom stall.
I think kids today are far less likely to be offended, and are in more racially mixed situations, more racially accepting, than our generation was. We were certainly moreso than our parent’s generation before us.
I think having a discussion with your child which says:
“Look, I know to you, it’s no big deal, and for you and your friends it isn’t. I don’t expect you to stop doing what you consider to be nothing more than routine conversation. On the other hand, understand that soon, perhaps even when you don’t expect it, someone is likely to be pretty offended, and when you start working, using the word Ni4#A or any other racially charged word, will get you fired on the spot, so you may want to start practicing NOT using it, before it becomes a habit.”
That said, perhaps someday, we can become a less PC place, where words aren’t taken as offensive unless there is a real and obvious intent to be offensive, or at least wilfully insensitive – like Islamo-facist. I’m not pointing that out to start an argument, but that it is an example of something wilfully insensitive.
I don’t ever hear my kids using racial epithets, even in passing or as jokes. I know I don’t use them – except to decry PCism, and never in front of my children. I live in a mid-tier suburb, they go to school with blacks, Indians, Pakistanis – but they are a little young yet, my day probably is coming. I’ve given you my answer which I’d never claim to be right, it’s just right for my kids- but you of course have to find your own.
I don’t ever hear my kids using racial epithets, even in passing or as jokes.
They are probably not your kids then, peev.
Pretty well said, Peev.
I remember a kid I went to college with – from a smaller, more isolated town than even mine – having that moment (my isolated rural college had a lot of kids from Chicago). He used an N word (modified with the adjective phrase “cotton-pickin'”, which means “doggone” on the plains, but meant something very different to the Chicago guys) in casual conversation one day – and found out the Chi kids didn’t have much taste for abstract comic intent.
Terry, corret. I see colleges wayyyyy over-reacting to one or two incidences of racial graffeti. Which is exactly what they the person who did it wants.
“Oh my…oh my heart! I’m coming to join ya’, Elizabeth!”
That’s how surprising I found peevish’s comment. 😉
>>Here’s an idea: don’t put a school into full-on panic mode because someone wrote a racially hatefull thing in a restroom stall.
Absolutely.
>>“It said they’re going to kill all of the N-words at the school and listed me and two of my friends,” said 17-year-old Anthony Stringer.
I’m baffled that people are more upset about the use of “the N-word” than of the threat of homicide.
There is a crime, in MN, called “terroristic threats.” It’s often misused. This is exactly the sort of incident it was intended for.
The solution isn’t to panic, it isn’t to lock down the school. It’s to round up the thugs who wrote it, put them in jail, prosecute them, and if convicted, imprison them.
And to let the rest of the students get on with their lives.
Jeff saved me a great deal of typing, just there. What he said.