Impressions of the West
It’s a strange sort of thing when people reveal their personal views to you, before they know whether or not those views will offend you. There are those, of course, who espouse their views without any concern for the reaction, and others who intend to illicit a negative response. I’m not talking about either of those. I mean everyday people in casual company who let on that, contrary to their public image – say, as a school teacher, they harbor some of the most odious views.
I imagine that it must be strange to be a white person of a liberal, progressive, or even anti-racist mindset and find yourself in the company of a casual bigot. For your common “race”, the bigot supposes that you will not take any particular offense to his off-handed comments about other groups.
I suppose that it is stranger still to be a person of color and to have a white person feel comfortable enough in your presence to reveal that they are a casual bigot. Where I come from – the east coast – there is hardly a greater insult to a white person than to be called a racist. It is such a sensitive subject that in “mixed” company, white people take great – and often awkward – strides to prove to people of color – especially African-Americans – that they are “okay”, that they are “down”, that they are not racist. A lot of fake smiles and superficial banter ensues.
(Note: Those who are not racist feel no urgent need to prove that they are not.)
Things appear to be different here in the West. And I can only speculate as to why. For the second time in two weeks, the mentor teacher in my field experience, and his colleagues, let on just what kind of bigots they are. In talking about the differences between his current and former schools, with regards to the behavior of the kids, he said that the current school had its problems, but was nothing compared to the former, which was 95% Hispanic.
Did you catch that? This man – a teacher responsible for the education of a diverse range of students – plainly equated troublesome behavior with ethnicity. As if somehow “95% Hispanic” serves as some sort of qualifier for for bad behavior. What was stranger to me than this blatant racism, was the fact that this white man felt comfortable enough around me – an African-American – to lay his prejudice out in the open. Had it been an isolated incident, maybe I could attribute it to misspeech on his part, or my own misinterpretation. Alas, it was not.
The second instance came today as he and a colleague discussed several students, and then the seventh grade student body as a whole. This time he let slip that he expected that in a matter of years his tax dollars would be paying for their – his students’ – food stamps. The colleague quickly interjected that sometimes the worst kids turn out to be decent members of society, that you “never know”. Even removing the racial implications of a mostly political statement, this is a teacher – who by profession needs to be an optimist – projecting how his seventh grade students (12 year olds) will be costing him money in the future. And his colleague, under the guise of a more open-mind, implied a necessary distinction between people who use food stamps and “decent members of society”. This same fellow, upon giving me a ride after school, in talking briefly about the city’s public transportation, mourned how it seemed that only “derelicts” with “holes in their pants” ride the buses. “Why can’t the buses be for everyone?”, he lamented.
I ride the bus – more so when I was back east – and invariably the majority of riders have been of lower socioeconomic status, and are predominantly non-white. I tend to equate categorical condemnations of lower social classes with sweeping judgments of people of color, being as though people of color are disproportionately poor. This requires no stretch of the imagination on my part. Where affluent or “successful” members of color are held aloft as evidence to the contrary – that in fact it is about class, not race (still a morally defunct point of view) – those people of color, for their attitudes, for their “non-threatening” demeanor, represent the opposite of general perceptions of people of color as a whole. So yes, it is about class, but in the minds of people like these – like the teacher who equated Hispanic with deviant behavior – race and class might as well be the same.
After a teacher meeting with the parent of a troubled student, there were two more interesting bits. Immediately afterwards, my mentor teacher felt it necessary to point out how unlike her mother the student was – the mother by my best guess Hispanic, while the girl could’ve simply passed for “white”. This made it clear to me that the issue of race hovers right there at the forefront of his consciousness, as it does it for me because I noticed too, but probably for use in completely different trains of thought. During lunch, a third colleague – a smarmy science teacher – suggested that there was something “off” about the mother, but didn’t elaborate. The mother, from what I saw, was incredibly anxious, speaking quickly and sometimes unintelligibly – and I assumed that it was because she had been called into a meeting and surrounded by teachers and administrators for a jury-style reprobation of her daughter. I have no doubt that she internalized any criticism of her daughter as a personal rebuke, and to her credit, she remained humble throughout the entire affair. I suspect that the science teacher, who classified the mother’s behavior as some permanent aspect of her personality, assumed that something else was to blame. Perhaps she too was keenly aware of the difference between mother and daughter.
When I first arrived out West, my intuition signaled something unusual, something “off” (at least compared to what was I used to back East) in terms of the social dynamics. In the east there is an unspoken bond between people of color, perhaps a mutual understanding of a shared plight. It is nothing so overt as a guaranteed pledge of support in anything, or even the promise of a conversation, but rather a nod or a prolonged eye contact that suggests a connection. This phenomenon is particularly prominent where people of color are the extremely visible minority in any given situation – eyes will scan the room anxiously for another pair like their own, and reflect an obvious relief upon finding one. The nod again, this time with more conviction.
What my intuition signaled, and it took me awhile to rationalize – was that this phenomenon – this unspoken bond – was completely absent here. The conditions were right, at least for African-Americans, because we are the extreme demographic minority – something like five percent – so the comfort nod, the conciliatory eye contact, should have been givens. But as I scanned the parking lots, the supermarkets, the barbershop, the malls, the connection was conspicuously absent. My yearning gaze was met with blank stares and awkward glance-aways.
As I rationalized the possible reasons for the stark difference between eastern and western social dynamics, I thought about the demographic differences. In Philadelphia, my home town, African-Americans make up at least half of the population. Reflecting the national distribution, most are in the lower socioeconomic class. For white people in Philadelphia – the majority of which are middle-class, “poor” and “black” are perhaps the two most threatening categories of people, if for no other reason than the sheer size of their memberships. Philadelphia has a long history of racial tension between black and white, most of which today bubbles beneath the surface and manifests primarily in the political arena. On the other hand, there is virtually no derisive buzz – at least not in the local media, in the local bars, or in the political forum about Latinos – under the pretext of “immigration” or any other.
Even before I arrived here in the West, it was well-known to me that immigration was a hot button issue here. It was also well-known to me that Latinos of any background – particularly Mexicans – were the significant population of color, analogous to African-Americans on the east coast. So it came as no surprise to me that “poor” and “Hispanic” would constitute the largest threat to middle and upper class white people out here.
So my speculation has been that African-Americans in the West, much like Latinos and Asians in the east, for their non-threatening numbers and significantly improved socioeconomic distribution, have been afforded a sort of “hostility waiver”. In other words, they are acceptable so long as they do not grow too large, act too radically, or cost the average taxpayer too much in social programs. A controlled minority is a tolerable minority. Those Hispanics on the other hand…
This demographic and social dynamic shift offers an explanation for the teachers’ comfort in expressing subtle and blatant racism in my presence. Perhaps in their experience, to whatever extent African-Americans are not a problem, they are welcome “into the fold”, that precarious place where they may comfortably share in – or at least quietly acquiesce to – white people’s disdain for those troublesome Hispanics – or, rather, those indecent food stamp users, bus riders, and struggling twelve year olds.
Perhaps I am projecting here, but could those blank stares and awkward glance-aways I mentioned earlier – the severing of the “color-connection” – reflect the quiet shame of complicity? For my part, the decision to remain silent in the face of such bigotry and classism is a calculated one. My mentor teacher’s assessment of my performance – and the grade that comes from it – will be little more than a gauge of his personal opinion of me. While I have had thoughts of unleashing “Godheval”, I realize that even switching mentors wouldn’t guarantee me a different situation in another school. I suspect, even, that his attitude, and those of his colleagues, are entrenched in the political views of the state as a whole. So for now this post will have to suffice in terms of any public display of indignation. And more importantly, I will reach out to the students personally, in every attempt to counteract the endemic prejudice and pessimism of the faculty.