Tuesday Has No Phones (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thebratqueen) wrote2007-08-08 06:56 pm
thebratqueen) wrote2007-08-08 06:56 pm
IBARW: That moment of "Oh."
It's International Blog Against Racism Week and so many others have written amazing posts so far (a roundup can be found here) that they've inspired me to try to throw my hat into the ring.
When I was in elementary school - I want to say third grade or thereabouts - I was sitting in the schoolyard with one of my friends and began to tell a joke. I don't remember where I'd heard it. Perhaps from my older brothers, perhaps from reading it in one of those Tasteless Jokes books that were apparently popular at the time.
Regardless, there we were sharing jokes together and I began to tell this one that I knew. Halfway through the telling of it I stopped and realized I couldn't finish it. That was because the joke was racist against black people, and my friend was black.
I don't remember the specifics of what the joke was, or exactly how I got myself out of it. If I remember correctly I came up with a new punchline on the fly and stumbled my way through that. If my friend noticed the lack of humor or the hesitation, she didn't say anything about it. Maybe because she was being polite, maybe because she didn't understand what had just happened, or maybe because at 8 years old nobody expects you to be particularly smooth or funny at joke telling.
For my young mind the situation was a very sudden paradigm shift. I grew up in Queens, NY. I went to public school. My friends and classmates were of every background imaginable. Sure I'd heard about racism and how it was a Bad Thing, but it had never before occurred to me that this applied to anyone that I knew. It seemed impossible that anyone would need a lesson about how we were all people under our skin when folks who were black, Jewish, Korean, Latino, etc. were right there. It'd be like saying we all needed a lesson in believing in chairs. As an elementary schooler the only thing I cared about friends-wise was if kids lived near me, with bonus points if you were already on my block.
So when I first started telling the joke it didn't occur to me that there was a problem. The joke had been grouped together with Women jokes, Polish jokes, Irish jokes, dead baby jokes, and so forth. I wasn't really old enough to get why the jokes were supposed to be funny, I just knew that they were classified as such. Likewise, because the categories were so broad, it didn't occur to me that there was a problem with the jokes being what they were. To my kid brain I figured that everyone belonged to a category of some kind, and we all understood that our categories meant a certain kind of joke. I didn't think it meant that people of those categories were like the jokes portrayed - though admittedly my Irish relatives did drink as much, if not more, than their joke counterparts did. It was just a code word. Or a "In the old days people believed this, but not any more."
But as I told the joke I realized this wasn't the case. My friend was black, and the punchline of the joke referred to those who were black as being stupid and inarticulate. I realized that if I finished the joke out loud it might hurt my friend's feelings. I may have gone so far as to think that she might get the impression that I agreed with the joke. But I do know that I didn't want her to hear it. I didn't want her knowing that somebody had made a joke up that was against her and her family just because of the color of her skin.
(Hey, I was as control-freaky and overprotective at that age as I am now. We're what, surprised by this?)
So a new punchline was made up, and maybe my friend laughed at it and maybe she didn't. I don't remember what we did after that. I remember that in elementary school I played with kids of all types, and how I've got as many memories of happy times with friends of different races (using a shared report for the school newspaper to sneak out of class, being comforted after one of the teachers yelled at me, the birthday party across the street that to this day I wonder if it had been attended by Menudo before they got big...) as I do of the kids who were white (fake Kool-Aid allergy, panic over being given chicken during Lent, raking it in on Halloween by going to a party by a kid who lived in an apartment building...).
I don't remember if I ever told or got near to telling a racist joke again. But whenever they come up I flash back to that moment. Me, my friend, the bench with the worn paint and the splintery edges, and that horrible feeling in my gut that I'd been about to say words that would hurt her.
When I was in elementary school - I want to say third grade or thereabouts - I was sitting in the schoolyard with one of my friends and began to tell a joke. I don't remember where I'd heard it. Perhaps from my older brothers, perhaps from reading it in one of those Tasteless Jokes books that were apparently popular at the time.
Regardless, there we were sharing jokes together and I began to tell this one that I knew. Halfway through the telling of it I stopped and realized I couldn't finish it. That was because the joke was racist against black people, and my friend was black.
I don't remember the specifics of what the joke was, or exactly how I got myself out of it. If I remember correctly I came up with a new punchline on the fly and stumbled my way through that. If my friend noticed the lack of humor or the hesitation, she didn't say anything about it. Maybe because she was being polite, maybe because she didn't understand what had just happened, or maybe because at 8 years old nobody expects you to be particularly smooth or funny at joke telling.
For my young mind the situation was a very sudden paradigm shift. I grew up in Queens, NY. I went to public school. My friends and classmates were of every background imaginable. Sure I'd heard about racism and how it was a Bad Thing, but it had never before occurred to me that this applied to anyone that I knew. It seemed impossible that anyone would need a lesson about how we were all people under our skin when folks who were black, Jewish, Korean, Latino, etc. were right there. It'd be like saying we all needed a lesson in believing in chairs. As an elementary schooler the only thing I cared about friends-wise was if kids lived near me, with bonus points if you were already on my block.
So when I first started telling the joke it didn't occur to me that there was a problem. The joke had been grouped together with Women jokes, Polish jokes, Irish jokes, dead baby jokes, and so forth. I wasn't really old enough to get why the jokes were supposed to be funny, I just knew that they were classified as such. Likewise, because the categories were so broad, it didn't occur to me that there was a problem with the jokes being what they were. To my kid brain I figured that everyone belonged to a category of some kind, and we all understood that our categories meant a certain kind of joke. I didn't think it meant that people of those categories were like the jokes portrayed - though admittedly my Irish relatives did drink as much, if not more, than their joke counterparts did. It was just a code word. Or a "In the old days people believed this, but not any more."
But as I told the joke I realized this wasn't the case. My friend was black, and the punchline of the joke referred to those who were black as being stupid and inarticulate. I realized that if I finished the joke out loud it might hurt my friend's feelings. I may have gone so far as to think that she might get the impression that I agreed with the joke. But I do know that I didn't want her to hear it. I didn't want her knowing that somebody had made a joke up that was against her and her family just because of the color of her skin.
(Hey, I was as control-freaky and overprotective at that age as I am now. We're what, surprised by this?)
So a new punchline was made up, and maybe my friend laughed at it and maybe she didn't. I don't remember what we did after that. I remember that in elementary school I played with kids of all types, and how I've got as many memories of happy times with friends of different races (using a shared report for the school newspaper to sneak out of class, being comforted after one of the teachers yelled at me, the birthday party across the street that to this day I wonder if it had been attended by Menudo before they got big...) as I do of the kids who were white (fake Kool-Aid allergy, panic over being given chicken during Lent, raking it in on Halloween by going to a party by a kid who lived in an apartment building...).
I don't remember if I ever told or got near to telling a racist joke again. But whenever they come up I flash back to that moment. Me, my friend, the bench with the worn paint and the splintery edges, and that horrible feeling in my gut that I'd been about to say words that would hurt her.