May 23, 2009

• An Education in Racism

  Dear Folks,

  The past few days have witnessed a shift in our TV watching.  Actually, we don't have "TV," per se, but we have what you might call a "TV."  We just don't have any television reception, and that is fine by us, our design in fact.  Plus, I would guess it is all Korean language broadcasting, which we don't need.   My wife is South Korean and places no value on having our children learn the Korean language, which is the dominant reason we don't send them to public schools here.

  There are other reasons, for example, the rampant bullying and racism.  Even though my children are fifty percent Oriental, they don't really look it.  They look all white.  That's fine with me; I'm not a racist.  Nor was my father.  He bought a bunch of cheap land in a rural black neighborhood at 300 bucks an acre forty years ago, back when racism in rural North Carolina altered supply and demand such that you could pick up really cheap land that way, if you had no truck with living with Blacks.  We got a twenty-two acre farm for a song. 

  Also, I played so much basketball that my dream was to become an NBA player.  Somehow that did not entirely materialize, and I'm now teaching "the English" here in "the South Korea."  But I did learn to speak the Black dialect of rural western North Carolina fluently, having played ball with my neighbors on our court at my home almost every day from age 7 or 8 until I left high school.  And my mutual love with my neighbors made it impossible for me to think of them as "other." 

  In fact, Utne Reader, to which I used to subscribe before I got financial obligations of a wife and five children to support, once noted that perhaps the ultimate litmus test of whether you were a racist was to ask yourself the question of whether you would not mind being Black.  A tolerance for "Salt and Pepper" marriage, they insisted, was less compelling, at least to them, and I see their point.  I found that easy to answer, as I knew and loved my close Black friends, so it was easy to answer in the negative, in my mind, to note that I would not mind a bit being Black.  I knew of personality changes I would make with any one of my friends, if I were to suddenly and hypothetically swap places with him, but skin change is just not on the agenda. 

  Over the next thirty years, two factors multiplied the value of that land one hundred fold, to 30,000 per acre:  A) Our Black brethren grew in social status and improved their homes, and B) other Whites became far less racist and were not opposed to living in that area.  Kudos for my father. 

  In fact, racism is one of the three book-stoppers within my personal censuring filter that make me put down a book, topics which when supported in any affirmative way, no matter how valuable or appealing other topics from the same author may seem to be on the surface, make me just put the book, or article down, and count myself lucky I got only that far in wasting my time with what is "smut" to me. 

  So I generally like it when my children can learn about different groups of people.  We have a host of DVD's from the early 50's and 60's, before public TV, too, became more smutty in many people's eyes.  Just the past few days, I noticed that we had two programs which introduced Indians to my children:  "Little House on the Prairie" and "Kung-fu."  I sat there with my daughter just an hour ago and watched one episode in season one from Little House where a Sioux Indian was on the show.  

  I dislike it when, as in this show, the writers (and producers) decide to view and depict the Indians through a relatively "thick" Christian filter, imposing strong features of Christianity, such as the Golden Rule, as in the show we watched today, when there is just not such strong evidence that their religion was dominated by love of one's enemy, or at least not to the extent we generally understand it to be within Christian thought and writings. 

  I try to explain to my children that some features which we take for granted, freedom of speech and the respectful treatment of women, children, minorities and the underclass in society, are just not as well supported by reliable eye witnesses to precursor cultures here, as our movie producers tend to make them for sale to the dictates of the "yearning modern public."  And that's understandable; if modern people feel guilty for their nation's (at times horrible) mistreatment of Indians, and they now enjoy the advantage of living in relative safety (having won the displacement war), then it is easy to see how they would clamour for pablum which caters to the popular image of the noble savage. 

  One thing I do believe is that if American Indians were more loving towards their enemies and women, then their cultures would have been stronger and more viable.  And I do believe that they are not stupid, but that modern day descendents of American Indians are in the best position to pick and choose, glean the best moral influences from the religions of their ancestors (from all races and cultural influences) and then inculcate those into their lives. 

  I believe the source of America is from some Italian, right?  Wasn't his name "Amerigo," or something to that affect, and yet it does not bother me that people here in South Korea refer to me as an "American," even though I am a citizen of merely one of many nations sitting on the two American continents.  I like to tolerate the free speech and expression rights of all who address me in any form of communication, so long as it is tendered with a tone of respect and consideration.  To me that is the only way we can live together as a variety of groups, by incorporating tolerance for diversity in expression.  From what I have read the thought police have been on the resurgence in the U.S. while I was gone, with people imposing their firebrand images of politically correct speech on others.  This is not just pathetic, to see our culture going that way, limiting freedom, but sad. 

  I hope it is not so bad as it seems from the newspaper reports, with common people proving to have a whole heap of a lot more sense than writers who proliferate on the web.  We'll see when I get there next year.  It has been better than a decade since I've set foot on U.S. soil. 

  Education in racism for my children: 

  I believe it important to prepare my children for potential racism in the U.S.  Heretofore they have always been on the receiving end of discrimination and oppression.  I want them to become sensitive to the plights of other minorities in the U.S.   My parents say that there is a sizeable population of Hmong people and Laotian people in our rural area now, and they attend the elementary school we thought we would use for our children, for the first year of our return to the U.S., though now that is not so certain, as we may move directly into seminary housing, so much enamored have I become of the seminary education I am getting.

  Still, I like the fact that my children are exposed to a variety of cultures on old TV sitcoms and dramas before we make our exodus.  We have The Cosby Show, I Love Lucy, Gomer Pyle, and TAGS, among a host of others, totalling more than 4000 dollars worth now, though I stopped counting at 4000.  And my wife has insisted I stop buying, at least for a while.  "If Mamma ain't happy ain't nobody happy."  Gotta remember that adage, no? 

   

  • 2:25 am
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