White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (46 page)

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Authors: Tim Wise

Tags: #History, #Politics, #Sociology, #Memoir, #Race

BOOK: White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son
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Perhaps even more importantly, kids pick up on inconsistencies between what we say as parents and what we do, paying far closer attention to the latter than the former. If you tell your kids not to fight, for instance, but then they see or hear you fighting with your spouse or partner, they will have a hard time internalizing the “no fighting” message given the actual behavior they’re witnessing. Likewise, we can say we believe in diversity and equity, and value multiculturalism and integration, but if we send our children to monoracial, monocultural schools, live in monoracial, monocultural neighborhoods, and expose them to social settings in which everyone looks like them, they will see the inconsistency, translate it as hypocrisy, and conclude that we, as parents, are lying to them when it comes to that which we value.
What’s more, because children tend to be egocentric, they commonly presume that their stuff is the best: their school, their neighborhood, or their circle of friends, for instance. If those schools, communities, and friendship circles are overwhelmingly white, it becomes natural for those children to conclude that the reason black and brown folks are not to be found in them must be because they aren’t as good as whites; if they were, after all, surely they’d be around us. Only if a parent is committed to
living
an integrated and multicultural life can they effectively preach the same to their kids. And only if we are committed to challenging the way in which our kids sometimes presume the normalcy of the racial divisions they see, can we hope to imbue them with enough of a sociological imagination to critically assess the world around them and then change it for the better.
THE GOOD NEWS
is, kids are incredibly capable of engaging these matters, and at a much higher level than that for which we normally give them credit.
In the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity to speak in dozens of middle schools, and even a few elementary schools, to kids between the ages of seven and twelve. In a few cases, I’ve even discussed issues of race and racism with pre-school children as young as five. Contrary to what many parents seem to believe, not only can they handle the subject matter, they can often lead the conversations, with very little formal facilitation.
I’ve often asked children where we get our ideas about people who are different than ourselves, especially when it comes to color; inevitably, it takes them no time to begin offering answers. “From the media,” is the most common answer, and when I ask them what they mean, they demonstrate a savvy grasp of the way that various sources of racial imagery effect their consciousness, from television to music videos to video games to things they see on the internet. In fact, at several schools when I’ve engaged kids on these matters, they can talk for a half hour straight, with almost no active facilitation, just pointing out example after example of racial imagery, as well as gender and class imagery in media, and the way those images can sometimes give false and misleading impressions about members of certain groups.
One young woman at a middle school in San Francisco, for instance, told me (and her peers, all gathered in the gym for a discussion) that she had been afraid of homeless people because of the stories she had heard on the news about various crimes committed by the homeless, or how the city had been trying to move the homeless out because of so-called “aggressive panhandling” in commercial and tourist districts. She then mentioned how she had gotten to know a homeless man who often walked up and down the street where she and her family lived, by speaking to him one day after he had asked her a question. Through their conversation she came to realize that most of her assumptions had been wrong. Yes, she understood, there may be some homeless people who fit the stereotype so commonly believed to be true, and so often portrayed in the news, but she also realized that she couldn’t and shouldn’t be so rigid in her thinking as to assume those things to be true in each and every case, or even most cases.
Other students have been able to discuss, in a very sophisticated manner, the way that media gives negative impressions about poor folks, Arabs, Muslims, immigrants (especially of color), and, of course, young people. In each case, the students often know far more about the problems with the images than we likely give them credit for, but rarely, they note, has anyone ever discussed these kinds of things with them or asked them to really think about the issue.
Almost as soon as Ashton had turned two (and Rachel was coming into the world), I had begun to think about how media images would impact their consciousness around race, gender, and class, and how those dynamics interact. From Disney films to advertisements, I wondered how their image of themselves and others could be misshapen by outside influences, and how Kris and I might best inoculate them against the worst aspects of those influences. Especially given the way in which female body image is influenced by advertisers—and how white women are especially given, according to the research, to heightened concern about weight and body type—these were the kinds of things that I knew we’d need to think about by the time they were in school.
Yet, we didn’t want to be the kind of parents who overly policed what they would see, to the point of sheltering them, unrealistically. I wasn’t going to be the parent who plopped the “Kill Your Television” sticker on his car, or who self-righteously preened about how there was no pop culture in our home, or how Mickey Mouse was evil and so there would be no Disney either. Fully aware of the problems with pop culture, and more than a little aware of how troubling much of the Disney brand has been over the years, I nonetheless would prefer that my child be conversant with the dominant culture and develop a way to eventually critique it—to see its good and bad elements—than to be kept from it, only to covet it more than ever. One thing that had always bothered me about many of my compatriots on the left was that their ability to relate to average, everyday folks seemed compromised by their desire to view, with contempt, all aspects of the dominant material culture—to look down on the cultural diversions of working class folks, even as they claimed to be fighting for the interests of those same people. I’ve been guilty of it too, frankly, taking more than a few sideways glances at NASCAR, for instance, but the truth is this: if progressives can’t figure out a way to speak to the people I see walking down Main Street U.S.A. in Disney’s Magic Kingdom—and that doesn’t mean telling them how the Disney-fication of the culture reinforces racism, classism, and patriarchy—then all hope is lost for a better society.
EVERY NOW AND
then, Disney even manages to provide a moment of opportunity for deeper discussion about important issues, though that might not have been their intent. For instance, of all the problematic Disney films out there, the only one that I really didn’t want my kids to see was Pocahontas. Something about the way that Hollywood (or in this case, Burbank) had managed to characterize Matoaka (Pocahontas’s real name)—as an intensely spiritual stereotype whose ability to commune with nature allowed her to converse at length with an old lady in the form of a tree—struck me as deeply troubling. Not to mention, Matoaka’s story is quite a bit less romantic than the Disney version, involving as it does her forced abduction by Englishmen, from which abduction she was only able to obtain release if she agreed to marry John Rolfe, whose lust for her overrode concerns like her young age at the time of their first sexual encounter. Not only does Disney ignore the coerced relationship with Rolfe, they fabricate a love interest between she and the mercenary captain, John Smith, which historians agree never existed. When descendants of Matoaka offered to help Disney tell a more accurate version of her story, Roy Disney, nephew of Walt, refused.
But as much as I had hoped not to bring the film into our home, I ultimately capitulated when Ashton, at the age of 4, pleaded for me to purchase it while visiting Disney World in 2005. I agreed to do it, but knew in my own mind that we’d have to process it together and discuss some of the elements of the film, if not the first time we watched it, at some definite point in the future. I’d be watching it, pen and pad in hand, taking notes for later conversation.
The film was dreadful. Disney’s Pocahontas is drawn as a thin, angular, somewhat Asian-looking beauty, while her father, Chief Powhatan, is portrayed as a large, threatening Indian leader, and her native suitor, Kocoum, as an overly war-like brat. The white characters are often drawn in less-than-flattering ways too, although in the end the message seems to be that even we can get in touch with nature and live peacefully, if subjected to the wisdom of Grandmother Willow—the tree to which Pocahontas introduces Smith. That in the wake of Matoaka’s capture the English would come to decimate the Powhatan people calls into question such a sanguine account, but to Disney, historical details such as this can’t be allowed to intrude upon the telling of a good princess story.
Frankly, Ashton wasn’t really crazy about the movie. It didn’t really hold her interest, but nonetheless, I knew I’d want to speak with her about some of the details. Fortunately for me, that task was made easier after watching a few of the “extras” on the DVD. After the movie ended we watched some of the special features and one in particular stood out: it was a few minutes during which the chief illustrator on the film was describing his artwork to an auditorium filled with people, either at an illustrator’s convention, or perhaps a Disney function of some sort. As he stood on the stage, an overhead projector displayed an image of his Pocahontas, and then contrasted it with the actual image of Matoaka, drawn during the time she was in England, after being taken there by Rolfe. Needless to say, she looked nothing like the image he had created—a fact about which he proceeded to joke, noting sarcastically something to the effect that “as you can see, we remained very true to the original.” Laughs all around. Hilarity reigns. My what a cut-up!
I saw it as my opportunity.
“Hey Ashton,” I said.
“Yeah?” she replied.
“Why do you think they decided to make her look different like that?” I inquired.
“What do you mean?” she responded
“Well, you saw that picture right?” I continued. “The one of the real Pocahontas? And how different she looked from the way the movie made her look? Why do you think they did that?”
She looked puzzled for a minute, like she was trying hard to come up with a good answer. “I dunno,” she said. “Maybe they thought she was prettier that way.”
“Yeah,” I replied, “I bet your right. In fact, it sorta seemed like he was making fun of the way she actually looked, huh?”
“Yeah,” Ashton responded.
“Hmmm,” I noted. “So, how do you think you’d feel if someone wanted to make a movie about your life and decided they didn’t like your red hair, or the color of your skin, or something like that, and decided to change it?”
“I think that would hurt my feelings,” she replied.
“Yeah, I bet it would,” I said. “So how do you think Native Americans might feel, seeing him joke like that about how much prettier his version of Pocahontas is, compared to the actual Pocahontas?”
“I think they might feel bad about that,” she responded, clearly taking in the point I was hoping for her to see. “I think it would hurt their feelings. I don’t see why they couldn’t just make her look the way she really looked.”
“Yeah, that’s a good point,” I replied. “I guess sometimes the people who make the decisions don’t always take everyone’s feelings very seriously, huh?”
“Yeah,” she said, disturbed by the implications of what she’d come to see.
Lesson learned, I was glad we’d watched Pocahontas.

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