{"id":2643,"date":"2008-06-02T06:05:35","date_gmt":"2008-06-02T11:05:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2643"},"modified":"2008-06-01T12:24:14","modified_gmt":"2008-06-01T17:24:14","slug":"what-once-were-no-nos-are-now-unpunished-crimes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2643","title":{"rendered":"What Once Were No-Nos Are Now Unpunished Crimes"},"content":{"rendered":"

I read this bit here in yesterday’s Strib<\/a>, about a mother’s reaction to racist grafitti in a north suburban high school:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The message included the slur and incited students to hang three specific male students before the school year ends on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Stringer’s mother responded:<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And I started thinking:\u00a0 do we<\/em>?<\/p>\n

No, it’s not a slap at schools; indeed, they’re in an almost impossible position.<\/p>\n

Bear with me for a moment.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0 media, everyone – working overtime to beat into our heads that racism was a Bad Thing.\u00a0 The n-word was bad; skin color is not a person’s measure; don’t discriminate.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So I remember how uncomfortable it made me when I was working as a nightclub DJ, hearing the “N” word popping up in music.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 If that.<\/p>\n

And then as a part of fairly normal conversation in urban culture – in the store, on the bus, wherever.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And then as an element of satire in a classic South Park <\/em>episode.<\/p>\n

Which leads us back to the Strib article.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Here’s the paradox:\u00a0 I’ve noticed that\u00a0teenagers today are much more comfortable around racial diversity than when\u00a0I was a kid (or so I presume).\u00a0\u00a0They’re also <\/em>more aware of the effects of identity politics (consciously or\u00a0not).\u00a0 And they’re also <\/em>more comfortable with using\u00a0the sort of language that makes a lot of people of\u00a0my generation (of all races) blanche with discomfort, for the pure teenagery joy of…well, making people of their parents’ generation blanche with discomfort.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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…<\/em>” – a perfectly fine way to show the adults how much I wasn’t like them.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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?\u00a0 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?<\/p>\n

On the one hand, I think (and admit I could be very very wrong) that teenagers today are a lot <\/em>more likely to “joke”, inappropriately or not, about race than I would ever have been comfortable doing.\u00a0 On the other hand, I think they’re vastly less likely to act <\/em>on anything of the sort than the language might make one think.<\/p>\n

Which, if I’m right (who knows?) is either a very good thing, or a very bad one.<\/p>\n

Or both.<\/p>\n

I have no idea.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Conclusion?\u00a0 I have no idea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2643\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}