Not Such A Wonderful Place to Raise a Family.
Tue Oct 10, 2006 at 11:05:15 AM PDT
Editor's Note: Progressiveinky laments the racists attitudes she encounters when visiting her hometown and her relatives who still reside there. As the thread of comments quickly reveals, bigotry exists everywhere - not just in small towns and southern states. I grew up in small towns myself, and regularly hear racist jokes and statements from family members who still reside in communities that are largely lilly-white. They think I'm uptight or a fuzzy-headed liberal if I take offense, but the fact is, they rarely socialize with brown people. They have no idea who or what they're talking about. Once you've lived and worked within a racially and ethnically diverse population, those off-hand remarks seem radioactive, ignorant, and pitiful. It's hard to bring that gap, and hard to know how to behave when children are present.
-Amy
I live in a state where all my life I've heard, "It's a wonderful place to raise a family." I guess I never really questioned it. I mean, it's Middle America. Not too far south, not too far north. A border state in the Civil War. I grew up in a town with low crime, made up of mostly working families. Why wouldn't it be a great place to raise a family? Nothing ever happens there. Nothing. And that is just how the locals like it.
Growing up there, I always felt like the square peg squeezing myself through that round hole. I'm the only person in my family who left. I'm the only one to get married older than 20. I'm the only one with a college education. Thank the Gods I don't live there anymore!
Now that I'm out of that environment in a larger city within the same state, I mostly don't worry about what goes on there. From time to time I do have telephone conversations with non-thinking, conflict-avoidant, God-fearing relatives and I have to stop to shake my fists in frustration. But mostly I try to just be tolerant of their beliefs and remember that those unchangeable beliefs work for them. After all, my husband and I can ignore it. We know the truth even if they are incapable of seeing it. But what about our son?
I'm becoming increasingly aware that this is not a wonderful place to raise a family. Last Saturday evening my brother and some colleagues (they work together in a Christian ministry) were in town on a business matter. Since my brother sees his nephew rarely, my 2-year old and I went to dinner with the group. In the two hours that we were having dinner there were 4-5 racist comments about four different ethnic groups. Equal opportunity bigots.
Now, if my son were older and could understand a philosophical conversation, I'd explain to him that the people we were having dinner with suffer from mental illness. But he's not. He's 2 1/2. Just old enough to pick up on conversations and meanings. Not old enough to understand why the line of conversation was wrong.
It brought me back to the day that the 7-year old from next door used a racial slur in the presence of my son (who was then 18 months old) and how horrified I was. In her case, I could just tell her we don't use those words at our house and she stopped. With the adults at dinner I had to work toward suppressing my own reaction to scream and guide the conversation into appreciating diverse cultures.
Although I grew up hearing these comments and slurs, I have actively worked against any subtle effects they might have had. One might think that I wouldn't have been shocked at the line of dinner conversation. But I was. I was horrified. To me it must have been the equivalent of how a conservative Christian mother feels when her daughter is subjected to feminism.
My concerns are about my son but it goes much deeper than that. Because I live in a reality that actively fights against racism and promotes tolerance, I'd forgotten how deep those stereotypes are entrenched. I ached for the middle schooler who sat next to her intolerant father. And I hoped that she, like me, would fight against this disease of ignorance.
