Race Relations
At Metropolis this morning, I listened in on the conversation of three women: an older African American woman, a middle-aged white woman, and a young girl, maybe 12, who was of mixed ethnicity. At a guess, I would have said black, white, and Asian, but who knows? Anyway, here's what was going down.
The middle-aged white woman was, I believe, the girl's mom. The older lady was an acquaintance of theirs. The girl, for a school report (coinciding with MLK Jr. Day), was to compare and constrast the pre- and post-civil rights era. She was supposed to be interviewing the older lady (who had been a Chicago Public Schools teacher during that time) about how housing and education had been affected by the civil rights struggle.
What really happened was this: the lady started talking about something, for example, school segregation. The girl started writing what the lady said. The mom interrupted the lady to ask a more in-depth question (always phrasing it as if the girl was asking it, for example, "Why don't you ask her about busing?"). The lady started to answer that. The mom and the lady would start arguing (well, differing in opinions, but seeing as the lady was a black lady who's lived through the civil rights movement, and the mom was a white lady who had probably been born toward the tail end of said movement, I think we can agree on whose opinion we should probably be listening to here). The girl would stop writing. Then they'd get back on track. Rinse, repeat.
What the lady had to say was pretty interesting (for example, when she was in school, the bus would come to the white kids' houses to pick them up, then drop them off at school, and then the bus would come back and make one stop in the black kids' neighborhood, and they'd all have to go down to the corner and wait). But the mom seemed to think that because she had a mixed-race daughter (and thus, presumably, a husband or partner of a different race, although could be the kid was adopted) that she had some very important points to make about the history of civil rights in this country. The point of the whole exercise, of course, was to talk to someone who had been there and lived through it. But when the lady would say something that contradicted the notions that the mom had (for example, the lady said that the gangs didn't have a lot of sway in her South Side neighborhood back then), the mom said, no, the gangs were very powerful, they helped keep the riots under control in your neighborhood, which is why it didn't get as bad as on the West Side. The lady allowed, for sake of politeness, that maybe the gangs were all working behind the scenes. But really, wouldn't you just take the word of the person who was, I dunno, actually there? And didn't just see it in a documentary on WTTW?
Seriously, I wonder how many of the problems in our country, specifically surrounding race, would be solved if both sides would put aside what they think they already know and learn to actually listen to what the other was saying.
The middle-aged white woman was, I believe, the girl's mom. The older lady was an acquaintance of theirs. The girl, for a school report (coinciding with MLK Jr. Day), was to compare and constrast the pre- and post-civil rights era. She was supposed to be interviewing the older lady (who had been a Chicago Public Schools teacher during that time) about how housing and education had been affected by the civil rights struggle.
What really happened was this: the lady started talking about something, for example, school segregation. The girl started writing what the lady said. The mom interrupted the lady to ask a more in-depth question (always phrasing it as if the girl was asking it, for example, "Why don't you ask her about busing?"). The lady started to answer that. The mom and the lady would start arguing (well, differing in opinions, but seeing as the lady was a black lady who's lived through the civil rights movement, and the mom was a white lady who had probably been born toward the tail end of said movement, I think we can agree on whose opinion we should probably be listening to here). The girl would stop writing. Then they'd get back on track. Rinse, repeat.
What the lady had to say was pretty interesting (for example, when she was in school, the bus would come to the white kids' houses to pick them up, then drop them off at school, and then the bus would come back and make one stop in the black kids' neighborhood, and they'd all have to go down to the corner and wait). But the mom seemed to think that because she had a mixed-race daughter (and thus, presumably, a husband or partner of a different race, although could be the kid was adopted) that she had some very important points to make about the history of civil rights in this country. The point of the whole exercise, of course, was to talk to someone who had been there and lived through it. But when the lady would say something that contradicted the notions that the mom had (for example, the lady said that the gangs didn't have a lot of sway in her South Side neighborhood back then), the mom said, no, the gangs were very powerful, they helped keep the riots under control in your neighborhood, which is why it didn't get as bad as on the West Side. The lady allowed, for sake of politeness, that maybe the gangs were all working behind the scenes. But really, wouldn't you just take the word of the person who was, I dunno, actually there? And didn't just see it in a documentary on WTTW?
Seriously, I wonder how many of the problems in our country, specifically surrounding race, would be solved if both sides would put aside what they think they already know and learn to actually listen to what the other was saying.
posted by Tangent at 6:46 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home